The Factors Affecting the Reverse Supply Chain and Circular Economy, Case Study: Mobarakeh Steel Company

Production companies currently face significant environmental concerns, which raised the circular economy (CE). The CE is an economic system that aims to eliminate wastes by reusing them. This study aims to investigate the factors affecting the reverse supply chain in order to implement the CE in Mobarakeh Steel Company of Isfahan. Structured interviews were conducted with 13 managers and experts of the company. Among the factors in the literature, 16 factors were specifically identified as relevant to the company. The Delphi method has been used in order to determine the importance and priority of the factors for the company. To analyze the data, the analytical-survey method was used, and in order to collect information, a combination of library and field research methods was applied. By using these methods, we selected 7 factors out of 16 that were very important for the company. They were environmental-oriented design, industrial ecology, redistribution, reuse, redesign, recycling, and reduction. We prioritized these factors using the fuzzy TOPSIS method based on 6 criteria: efficiency of steel resources, slag use, electricity consumption, water consumption, gas consumption, and SO2 emissions. The result shows that “Industrial ecology” has the 1st and “Reuse” has the 7th priority. The relationships between these factors were identified using a panel of experts and then, plotted the relationships as an IDEF0 (Icam DEFinition for Function Modeling) model. This is the first attempt to configure the model of reverse supply chain factors in a steel company.