Small business roles and responses to the circular economy
Leveraging from the relationships and research progress made by the two co-investigators on this proposal on the now defunct Building 4.0 Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) New Technologies, the Future of Work, Skills and Industrial Relations (IR) project, the aim of this pilot project is to examine the adoption of circular economy (CE) principles in Australian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within the construction industry to explore its impact on sustainability performance.
Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities records show that every year in Australia, the building industry produces 27 million tons of waste (National waste report 2020). That is 44 per cent of all waste generated throughout the country. Of that building waste, 20 million tons end up in landfills every year (DECC, 2022).
As a pilot project, we will draw on a recently developed EU framework and adapt this into a tool to analyse:
- The current state of CE practices in Australia.
- Its impact on sustainability performance across key CE fields of action (design, procurement, production, distribution, consumption and recovery) for SMEs in the construction industry.