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Operations management (OM) research has made several important contributions to environmental sustainability over the last two decades. In this article, we point to a new opportunity on the horizon—the circular economy movement, which is gaining significant traction in practice. We introduce the concept and highlight the building blocks behind it. We also explain why this trend in practice can provide an opportunity for the OM community. To do so, we describe four companies that have been positioned as prime examples of implementing the circular economy concept and discuss the operational challenges faced by them. We draw on them to identify several promising and open questions for OM research and explain why an operations perspective is critical in this context.
Agrawal et al. (Mon,) studied this question.