A Digital Circular Economy for Smart Cities

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Kannikar Khaw-ngern et al.

Abstract

Due to the growing global population, the middle class is estimated to reach 5 billion by 2030, and all countries aim to increase their prosperity. This has caused enormous stress on our environment and our resources, which are reducing and becoming more difficult to extract. What worsens the situation is that manufacturers and consumers have tried to produce and consume as cheaply as possible. That has created a linear economy where objects are briefly used and then discarded as waste. The purpose of this article is to review the concept of smart city and how it can be implemented to promote circular economy, to study the difference between of digital city, intelligent city, smart city, and eco-city, to examine the role of digital technology in solving complexity in circular economy and how its functionalities in circular business models. Three case studies: Alpha, Philips CityTouch, and ZenRobotics have been reviewed. The result showed that digital technology can be mainly used for data collection, data exchange, data storage, and data analysis. Data analysis functionalities can be identified as monitoring and reporting product location, product condition and product availability; notifying predictive and preventive maintenance; identifying remanufacturing opportunities; optimizing product's energy consumption; enabling recycling, remanufacturing, product design and pricing; creating the intelligent product and virtual communication. Digital technologies are effective enablers for moving towards a circular economy which can deliver benefits for economy and environment such as increasing efficiency of raw material, reducing resource extraction, stimulating innovative designs, promoting production and remanufacturing, ensuring better distribution, consumption, reuse, and repair, as well as reducing waste.

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