Technological Innovations Promoting Circular Economy: A Profitable Tool to Close Resource Loops

For more than a decade, circular economy (CE) has been presented as a sustainable economic development model through actions focused on the revalorization and limitation of resource consumption that reduce environmental pollution. Even further, CE offers a regenerative framework encouraging the incorporation of innovations that facilitate the redesign of production and organizational processes. However, those innovations often shed light upon knowledge gaps that might diminish their chances of successful application in contexts where circularity is sought. The present work synthesizes the production of scientific publications issued on this subject from a bibliometric and systematic literature analysis. These analyses allow the authors to identify both limitations and future trends of research in relation to the contributions of innovations to CE. Among the results generated from this study, some of them clearly show an increase in articles centered on this subject with a dominant number of publications from European countries. The fundamental role of the European political-regulatory framework may explain these findings as European regulations have encouraged the introduction of innovations in the production processes to implement the CE principles. Hence, the need for future research broadening the scope to non-European countries was put forward. Another relevant finding was the dominancy of pilot scales description in the reviewed articles, namely the elaboration upon larger scale cases, which was also regarded as gap in this CE literature revision. Additionally, methodologies with more refined optimizations to further achieve the implementation of CE tenets were missing.