ABSTRACT
In recent times, there have been increasing pressures on businesses arising from resource scarcity, commodity insecurities and waste (Lieder and Rashid, 2016). There is evidence that industrial processes have already breached several planetary boundaries (Steffen et al., 2015) and that this poses a challenge for business leaders to consider their impacts through adoption of systems thinking (Whiteman et al., 2013; Perey et al., forthcoming). Simultaneously, a projected further three billion middle-class consumers will enter the market by 2030 (Nguyen et al., 2014). Trends project upward material consumption growth per capita (Fridolin et al., 1989), and even moderate United Nations scenarios indicate that such continued upward population and consumption trends means that the equivalent of two Earths will be needed to support the human resource demand and absorption of its wastes (Footprint, 2014). In addition to these growth trends, as global supply chains become more complex and dispersed, material leakages, whereby materials are wasted in the supply chain, persist. Consequently, waste is being produced at a rate far beyond what can be absorbed or recycled by the Earth’s ecological systems (WWF, 2015).
