Advancing the circular economy through group decision-making and stakeholder involvement

This paper discusses the potential of Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods (MCDM) to support co-operation between stakeholders and the ability to tackle bottlenecks in the recycling value chains. The empirical part of the paper is based on two MCDM exercises in which bottlenecks that hinder the efficient recycling of end-of-life vehicles and plastic packaging waste were evaluated and prioritized. The interlinked nature of the recycling chains poses challenges for the application of MCDM methods, and studies that apply group decision-making in the context of the circular economy are still rare. Despite these challenges, the findings of our case study indicate that group decision-making methods could be applied as participatory methods to enable the collection and integration of stakeholder views within circular economy policy development and implementation activities. A review of literature on existing bottlenecks for the circular economy indicates that there is an increasing need for co-operation and knowledge exchange between actors. It is proposed that in the future, MCDM methods could be used to create joint learning and idea exchange between value chain actors, as these are considered necessary for advancing the circular economy.