Using ReSOLVE framework to assess circular economy potential in Vietnam’s plastic sector

Abstract

The growth of the plastics industry is inherently "Linear Economic Modeling", i.e. excluding waste management from its scope. As a result, a significant amount of plastic waste that is not well managed is released directly into the environment. The circular economy model has been introduced in the plastics industry recently due to increasing environmental awareness at the societal and regulatory level. This study assesses how the Vietnam's plastics industry is implementing the circular economy concept using the ReSOLVE framework. A survey was conducted using a questionnaire with a total of 40 practices corresponding to six actions in the ReSOLVE framework to evaluate the performance of companies. The results show that the most used actions are "Optimize" (3.5 points) and "Loop" (3.4 points), which reflects the company's specificity of production, so they will focus on the operating part. Next is “Recycling” (3.4 points) with waste management for reuse, this reuse aims to save costs to avoid resource loss and “Exchange” (3.1 points) with updating products/services as well as new technology for production activities. Meanwhile, “Virtulize” and “Sharing” have lower compliance, reaching 2.8 and 1.9 respectively. Overall, the results also show that businesses have below average scores for all 6 actions in the ReSOLVE framework, which shows that the adoption of circular economy in the plastics industry is still low. The real reason is that businesses may not have a clear understanding of the circular economy, and the economy is the main driving force of the business, not the goal of sustainable development.