Circular Economy Practices for Net Zero: Analysis of Barriers in Indian Small and Medium Enterprises Context

Circular Economy (CE) acts as a green technologies approach that helps to achieve the target of net zero through waste reduction, emissions, and improvement of different traditional performance metrics of the organization. Business organizations in developing economies like India still face difficulty in adopting CE in actual practice due to a diverse set of barriers, obliviousness about the criticality of the barriers, and possible actions to mitigate the same. Therefore, this study identifies and evaluates the significant CE barriers for net zero in Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). To identify barriers authors used a systematic literature review, and further used expert panel opinions to categorize the same. To investigate CE barriers, the Pythagorean Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (PF-AHP) has been used in this study. A total of 28 barriers are identified and further investigated in this study. Further, it has been found that ‘management support’ and ‘legal framework in the CE journey’ as the most critical barriers to achieving net zero. This research provides a systematic, constructive, and well-organized pathway to decision-makers and industrial practitioners to adopt CE effectively and efficiently in the manufacturing practice to achieve the target of net zero. The study is of the first kind that explores and examines different barriers to CE in Indian SMEs to boost the applicability of CE principles.