Modelling hierarchical structure for circular supply chain in readymade garment industry

Abstract

In response to the happening environmental degradation and occurrences of natural disasters like Covid-19 and man-made disasters like Russian-Ukraine war, some international non-profit organizations along with manufacturing and logistics organizations are continuously working with introducing different timely concepts for ensuring sustainable co-existence of living creatures with manufacturing and business organizations.Circular economy is currently the most prominent concept among those. Consequently, current research projects are also trying to integrate circular economy concepts into the supply chains (known as circular supply chain) of different manufacturing industries. This research work deals with modelling the hierarchical structure of different attributes of circular supply chain (CSC) in the readymade garment (RMG) industry of Bangladesh. Firstly, this work extracted most suitable sixteen attributes of CSC in the RMG industry of Bangladesh using deductive (concept centric literature review) and inductive (review of relevant practitioners and academicians) approach. Afterwards, experts’ opinions were collected regarding the strength of causal relationships among those attributes accompanied by proper reasoning behind their opinions and fed into fuzzy total interpretive structural modelling (fuzzy TISM) methodology. This FTISM and another related procedure i.e., matrice d'impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment (MICMAC) analysis provided a defuzzified TISM diagraph (which is the model representing the hierarchical structure of those CSC attributes) and a MICMAC graph. Furthermore, results from Fuzzy TISM (FTISM) and MICMAC were combined to get a conceptual model with the CSC attributes. The conceptual model has been further tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Among those sixteen attributes, two attributes namely “internalization of circular economy concept in governing stakeholders” and “societal shift in consumption of resource and disposal of end-of-use product” were found out to be the most influential independent attributes in implementing CSC in the RMG industry of Bangladesh and other two attributes namely“resilience in the supply chain (SC)” and “activism of media and brands for sustainable marketing” are found to have the most dependency on other attributes. Whereas another four attributes namely“integration of design for circularity in products and services”, “innovations from research and development into action”, “possession of robust and smart logistics systems” and “upskilling of human resources throughout SC” act as linking attributes connecting the impacts of independent attributes with the dependent variables to make the CSC implementation fruitful. Results from thePLS-SEM reconfirm those findings. Thus, this research work delivers pivotal pathways to redesign the traditional RMG supply chains into the CSC system by suggesting a balanced mix of disruptive and evolutionary approaches based on Bangladesh’s scenario.