PhD in Sustainable development and cooperation

Contacts

Supervisor

Phd thesis

Circular Economy is seen as a new business model that operationalizes sustainable development, aiming at lowering material input and minimizing waste. Circular principles could be integrated into the management of the supply chains to reduce, maintain and recover resources for economic, environmental and social benefits.

As a matter of fact, packaging plays an important role in supply chains, but it is mostly designed to be disposed after a single use, with a use of large quantities of resources and a significant contribution to solid wastes’ production. Therefore, packaging is one of the sectors targeted by European plans to promote circularity.

This PhD project is intended to assess the application of Circular Supply Chain Management strategies in the packaging sector, thus focusing on both general management-related plans and products’ specific performances. To this, there will be developed a life-cycle based framework to quantitively assess the environmental and social impacts that arise from the application of the circular “R-Strategies”, focusing on the ones of “Replace”, “Reduce” and “Reuse”. In fact, there will be assessed the potential contribution of alternative bio-based material to improve both the environmental performances of packaging fillers’ production, as well as the social impacts thanks to reuse practices.

The proposed methodology is intended to be used as comprehensive and user-friendly support for strategic implementation. Therefore, it will be developed a prototype of a simplified tool to support Companies in results’ calculation and interpretation using interactive dashboards, thus highlighting issues both at the micro level (product) and the macro one (management).

The project will be developed in collaboration with the sustainability consulting and software company of GreenDelta GmbH.