Identifying Organizational Obstacles to the Acceptance of Circular Supply Chain Using the Stakeholder Analysis Approach

Taking into account the population growth, significant consumption of natural resources, environmental degradation and the resulting public unrest, the governments’ strategy of circular economy is not sufficient to meet the demands and it is required that the entire supply chain be transformed from the linear model to a circular one. Circular supply chain management is a good solution to reduce problems such as pollution, production patterns, consumption, resource scarcity and climate change. The goal of supply chain management is to optimize the resource consumption throughout the product life cycle by recycling. Despite the many advantages of using a circular supply chain, its implementation in some countries, including Iran, is associated with many obstacles. The present study has been designed and implemented with the aim of identifying and extracting these obstacles using the stakeholder analysis approach in the steel industry. In the first stage, the focus group method was used to identify the stakeholders of the steel industry and determine the position of each. In order to evaluate the validity and reliability of the research, the members of the focus group consisting of ten experts were selected based on their experience (at least five years) with the steel industry supply chain projects by purposive sampling. Data were categorized and prioritized through the interest-power matrix. The obstacles to the acceptance of circular supply chain were identified and extracted from the perspective of stakeholders through interviews. The steel industry policymakers can implement the circular economy approach in supply chains by taking measures to modify the factors identified in this study.