Enhancing clean technologies through risk mitigation in symbiotic industrial networks: A circular economy approach

The need for sustainability and zero-waste manufacturing in the industrial environment has increased in the last two decades. The adoption of the circular supply chain (CSC) across industries has been a prominent solution to this issue. CSC is a successful strategy that promotes sustainability by reutilizing industrial by-products or wastes, thereby preventing resource exhaustion. However, the complexity of the processes leads to the creation of multiple risks of various categories and dimensions in the circular supply chain, requiring critical analysis of these risks and the proposal of all-encompassing mitigation strategies. This work focuses on a functional symbiotic network involving multiple industries, namely sugarcane agriculture, sugar, paper, spirit manufacturing and cement industries. The study identifies the risks involved through an extensive literature survey followed by their categorization into ten risk categories (five external and five internal), such as demand and supply risk and operational risk. An integrated Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methodology is applied with the goal of prioritizing the proposed mitigation strategies with respect to the network of project goals, industrial components, and stakeholders. The results show that demand and supply risk and infrastructure risk are the highest-priority external and internal risks, respectively, and that buyer–supplier contracts are the most effective of the five mitigation strategies, followed by collaborative logistics and shared infrastructure. A sensitivity analysis confirms that these rankings are stable. The proposed framework helps the participating industries counter the prevalence and adverse effects of these risks and supports the sustainability goals of the network.