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This focus area aims to identify opportunities, barriers, critical success factors, and key circularity indicators for the adoption of CEBMs to create, deliver, and capture value in MCM supply chains.
Description
Existing Circular Economy Business Models (CEBM) are generic and therefore difficult to enact across different materials and sectors. Therefore, the development of a CEBM Canvas to drive circularity in mineral-based construction materials (MCM) supply chains is needed.
This project, led by Dr Jacob Mhlanga at Loughborough University, will aim to identify CEBM opportunities, challenges, enablers, circularity strategies and circularity indicators to facilitate the development and adoption of a CEBM Canvas in MCM supply chains.
He has completed a comprehensive literature review on the existing MCM business models, CE principles, CEBM archetypes, and their opportunities, challenges, and associated enablers. He has also explored the extant waste management practices in the gypsum industry and the potential of infinitely recirculating of the gypsum products in their highest value.
Here are the key points:
- The dominant business models in the MCM sector follow a linear model (take-make-dispose) resulting in waste generation and pollution at the end of the product life.
- A shift towards CEBM in the MCM sector is necessary to reduce the environmental strain of continued extraction of virgin materials, waste generation and pollution through recirculating MCM products in their highest value in a closed loop system.
- Gypsum is infinitely recyclable, but the current studies indicate that gypsum waste still finds its way to the landfills. It appears the lack of collaboration across the supply chain hinders recovering and recycling post-consumer gypsum waste.
- A CEBM Canvas informed by the plasterboard supply chain actors across the life cycle stages can potentially close the gypsum waste leakage and thus increase the circularity of the sector and open new circular economy business opportunities.
Jacob will be hosting two sequential workshops which will be attended by members of the plasterboard supply chain groups to collect data for developing a Plasterboard CEBM Canvas.
The first workshop, "Plasterboard Circular Economy Business Model (CEBM) Canvas Workshop" was held at Saint-Gobain Build Better Centre in London in March 2024. Various plasterboard actors including raw material suppliers, product manufacturers, designers/architects, installers/contractors, and demolition contractors and recyclers were in attendance.
Jacob gave an overview of the event and highlighted that the aim of the workshop was to examine the CEBM opportunities, challenges, and enablers across plasterboard’s life cycle stages. To achieve this aim, three workshop activities followed by cross-cluster discussions were conducted. The activities included:
- Identification and prioritisation of CEBM opportunities.
- CEBM challenges of the prioritised CEBM opportunities.
- CEBM enablers related to the CEBM challenges and their implementation timelines (short, mid, and long term).
This provided a platform for the plasterboard life cycle actors’ to actively engage in the co-creation of a Plasterboard CEBM Canvas to drive the sector towards sustainability.
The second workshop will explore the circularity strategies and indicators to inform the 9 components of the Plasterboard CEBM Canvas i.e., value proposition, key activities, key resources, key partnerships, channels, customer relationships, customer segmentation, cost, and revenue structures.
In 2025, Jacob will undertake his placement at Saint Gobain, a designer, manufacturer and distributer of sustainable construction materials and solutions, where he will be implementing and validating the Plasterboard CEBM Canvas in an industry context.