IMPLEMENTING CIRCULAR ECONOMY CONCEPTS FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN FREIGHT TRANSPORT: CASE OF TEXTILE MANUFACTURING SUPPLY CHAIN

Rapid industrialization and mass urbanization have generated a challenging situation for the city's planners and managers to maintain a balance between economic development and a sustainable environment for its inhabitants. Circular economy concepts can offer a unique opportunity to decouple growth from resource requirements. At the core of the circular economy, is the proposition of complete elimination of waste - i.e. waste not in its traditional sense, but any form of underutilization of assets and resources. A case study of the textile manufacturing industry in Surat, India is taken to compare the performances of traditional supply chain processes and the advantages of adopting circular economy concepts. Temporal sprawl of the textile industry is used to find the changes in trip lengths of urban freight trips over the last two decades. For estimating freight trips volume and patterns, roadside interviews of freight vehicles and establishment surveys of manufacturing and trading units were conducted. Overall urban freight transport contribution from the textile industry is estimated by modelling field data. Organized trip planning and optimized utilization of payload capacities can reduce vehicular emission generated from commercial goods movement in the textile industry to 2/3rd of its current levels. The paper asserts reinforces that the integration of circular economy principles with supply chain processes is beneficial from sustainability as well as a business point of view. The congestion mitigation due to the reduced number of trips offers a further reduction in the overall traffic emissions due to better traffic flows on the city's road network.