JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

In this era of high global business competition and resource depletion, the call for a new economic model is getting louder. In such a condition, the concept of circular economy (CE) has gone one step further to analyze its potentiality to address the recent business and economic sustainable developments and thus gained strong ground for adoption. In addition to the material resources, human labor is, indeed, an important input for the production process of products or services. However, there has been little study made on human labor or human factors as vital resources in the context of the circular economy. The purpose of this review is to explore how human issues are considered in the circular economy context by studying the existing literature. Thus, the focus is on employee well-being, occupational safety & health, employment issues, and human resource management. PRISMA tool was used for the systematic review. The review of articles shows that human issues were not directly the topic of interest for most of the researchers studying the perspectives of a circular economy. However, some issues related to this thesis came up in their studies. Thus, the current literature indicates the fact that the existing abilities of the employees, their skills, policies for workplace safety, and employee health issues are not in compliance with the progressive trend of CE adoption by different industries. In these regards, special employee training to build required skills, specific workplace safety measures, strong policies and regulations by government and other authorities are recommended to incorporate in circular business model to pursue the true effectiveness of circular economy.