Advancing circular economy through group decision-making and stakeholder involvement

Circular economy requires integrating life cycle thinking in product design and all following life cycle stages in order to enable efficient recycling, recovery, repair and re-use of products. This paper discusses the potential of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods to support cooperation between stakeholders and create learning that would be necessary in order to integrate life cycle thinking and tackle bottlenecks existing in the recycling value chains. Group decision-making methods could be an effective means for learning and integrating the views of different stakeholders in a structured way. However, the interlinked nature of the recycling chain and demands related to circular economy pose challenges also for the application and development of the MCDM methods. Handling bottlenecks within the recycling chain can be characterized by lack of data, high uncertainty related to assumptions and considering the relationship between many interlinked factors.