Evaluating barriers, enablers and opportunities for closing the loop through 'waste upcycling'

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) aim to ‘do more and better with less’, with and numerous calls to action arising from the business sector concerning the substantial reduction of targeted types of commercial and industrial waste. Emanating from the original work on closing material loops by McDonough and Braungardt in the 1990s, over the last two decades the concept of ‘upcycling’ has increased in popularity as a targeted intervention to reduce material and energy use in business processes. Essentially upcycling involves reusing, repairing, repurposing and upgrading waste material to avoid the conventional endpoint of ‘disposal’. However, upcycling is still considered as niche practice and remains unclear for many business enterprises on how exactly to use upcycling for better management of waste. Within this context, this paper comprises a systematic literature review of opportunities and barriers for enabling business enterprises to close the loop through waste upcycling. The review highlights the ad hoc, champion-based and highly variable use of upcycling practices and uncovers opportunities for more systematic and streamlined practices to produce value-added products from waste material. The authors draw on a variety of multidisciplinary resources to establish an emergent framework that shows how in successfully addressing these barriers and amplifying the enablers, would create sustainable outcomes. The findings also describe key benefits of upcycling including improved quality and life of material, creating jobs and influencing positive consumer behaviour. The authors propose that business enterprises could rapidly contribute to the circular economy through adopting upcycling practices to keep resources in the material cycle for a longer period of time.