Circular Economy Readiness: how does company size affect readiness

Society has been increasingly demanding more resources to satisfy its current production and consumption patterns, which extrapolates the planet’s biocapacity. To overcome this resource crisis, Circular Economy (CE) proposes an alternative model inspired by nature’s cyclical processes, for extending the use of resources, which results in the minimisation of resource consumption and waste generation. Despite the potential environmental and economic benefits of CE, companies are still struggling to transition, as demonstrated through the data collected from more than 600 companies in the ready2LOOP platform, a researchbased
platform that helps companies assess how ready they are to transition to CE. In this research, the circular readiness data of component, product and packaging manufacturers were analysed to investigate the influence of company size (i.e., micro, small, medium and large) on readiness across 10 dimensions and 40+ aspects. The results indicate that micro-companies have a higher overall CE readiness level, especially when it comes to
the Organisation. This shows that micro companies are scaling up the development of internal capabilities to implement CE. Small and medium companies display an even CE readiness distribution across dimensions,
reflecting a broad transition to CE with pilot projects across several areas. Large companies, on the other hand, showed a greater variation of CE readiness across dimensions, indicating that these companies are prioritising the investment and improvement on specific areas of CE. Large companies score particularly high in Technology & Data, presenting the relevance of providing CE solutions through data management and technology. The research enhances the understanding of the extent to which companies of different sizes are getting ready to transition to CE, which indicates potential new research areas and practical focus for supporting industry in the transition to CE.