Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how rising technologies from Industry 4.0 can be integrated with circular economy (CE) practices to establish a business model that reuses and recycles wasted material such as scrap metal or e-waste. Design/methodology/approach: The qualitative research method was deployed in three stages. Stage 1 was a literature review of concepts, successful factors and barriers related to the transition towards a CE along with sustainable supply chain management, smart production systems and additive manufacturing (AM). Stage 2 comprised a conceptual framework to integrate and evaluate the synergistic potential among these concepts. Finally, stage 3 validated the proposed model by collecting rich qualitative data based on semi-structured interviews with managers, researchers and professors of operations management to gather insightful and relevant information. Findings: The outcome of the study is the recommendation of a circular model to reuse scrap electronic devices, integrating web technologies, reverse logistics and AM to support CE practices. Results suggest a positive influence from improving business sustainability by reinserting waste into the supply chain to manufacture products on demand. Research limitations/implications: The impact of reusing wasted materials to manufacture new products is relevant to minimising resource consumption and negative environmental impacts. Furthermore, it avoids hazardous materials ending up in landfills or in the oceans, seriously threatening life in ecosystems. In addition, reuse of wasted material enables the development of local business networks that generate jobs and improve economic performance. Practical implications: First, the impact of reusing materials to manufacture new products minimises resource consumption and negative environmental impacts. The circular model also encourages keeping hazardous materials that seriously threaten life in ecosystems out of landfills and oceans. For this study, it was found that most urban waste is plastic and cast iron, leaving room for improvement in increasing recycling of scrap metal and similar materials. Second, the circular business model promotes a culture of reusing and recycling and motivates the development of collection and processing techniques for urban waste through the use of three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies and Industry 4.0. In this way, the involved stakeholders are focused on the technical parts of recycling and can be better dedicated to research, development and innovation because many of the processes will be automated. Social implications: The purpose of this study was to explore how Industry 4.0 technologies are integrated with CE practices. This allows for the proposal of a circular business model for recycling waste and delivering new products, significantly reducing resource consumption and optimising natural resources. In a first stage, the circular business model can be used to recycle electronic scrap, with the proposed integration of web technologies, reverse logistics and AM as a technological platform to support the model. These have several environmental, sociotechnical and economic implications for society. Originality/value: The sociotechnical aspects are directly impacted by the circular smart production system (CSPS) management model, since it creates a new culture of reuse and recycling techniques for urban waste using 3D printing technologies, as well as Industry 4.0 concepts to increase production on demand and automate manufacturing processes. The tendency of the CSPS model is to contribute to deployment CE in the manufacture of new products or parts with AM approaches, generating a new path of supply and demand for society.

Purpose: This paper aims to deal with the skills for sustainable development in engineering courses. The main objective is to identify which competences should be developed in these courses to contribute to the resolution of conflicts related to sustainability, as well as the means used by universities for their development.Design/methodology/approach: The research is divided into two strands: a theoretical and an empirical one. Concerning the theoretical part, the webibliomining method was adopted, to select the articles that were relevant to the theme, and 22 works were selected. Regarding the empirical study, structured questionnaires were applied to 30 specialists in the field, aiming at validating the competencies found in the literature.Findings: In the literature, eight main competencies required to the engineering professional, related to sustainability, were found. The empirical study showed that some competences are considered more relevant than others by the interviewees.Practical implications: The competencies verified in the present study and the relative relevance between them found in the empirical study can contribute to the engineering courses that wish to develop the sustainable behavior of the engineers in their professional or daily life.Originality/value: The originality of the work consists in presenting to engineering students and teachers as well as professionals of the market and the government the competencies that can contribute to the formation of an engineer capable of bringing adequate solutions to the conflicts of sustainability in the twenty-first century. This paper also presents learning teaching methodologies indicated for this purpose. No other works were found with these results.

Currently, Industry 4.0 (I4.0) represents a worldwide movement to improve the productivity and efficiency of operations and supply chain management (OSCM), which requires rethinking and changing the mindset of the way in which products are manufactured and services are used. Although the concept of I4.0 was not popularised in the ratification of the 2030 Agenda, I4.0 is a watershed in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It can serve as a platform for the alignment of the SDGs with the ongoing digital transformation. However, the challenges to the integration of I4.0 and sustainability in OSCM, and the benefits of this integration, in line with the SDGs, remain unclear. Moreover, there is a lack of a standard structure that establishes links between these challenges and benefits to strategically guide organisations on the journey towards a sustainable OSCM 4.0 (S-OSCM4.0) aligned with the SDGs. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to propose an S-OSCM4.0 framework for organisations to attain sustainability and I4.0 in OSCM, in line with the 2030 Agenda. Based on a systematic literature review, 48 articles that complied with the selection criteria were analysed using content analysis. The research findings were synthesised into taxonomies of challenges and benefits, and these categories were linked into a step-by-step framework, following an inductive approach. The proposed framework represents a novel artefact that integrates taxonomies in order to holistically achieve sustainable digitalisation for people, prosperity and planet benefits, and sheds light on the potential contributions of S-OSCM4.0 to the SDGs.

In the last decades, sustainable concerns have increasingly gained importance to organizational survival, and Lean/Six Sigma approaches are becoming more and more outstanding in order to improve sustainability performance. This article aims to evaluate the degree of importance of sustainable performance measures of Brazilian organizations and to propose guidelines to achieve sustainability by aligning these measures with operational improvement programmes. Multiple data collection methods were applied as theoretical literature review, questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews with industry professionals and academic researchers. The findings show that it is the corporate responsibility to focus their efforts on both operational improvement programmes and sustainable initiatives in order to achieve better environmental protection, corporate reputation, quality management, cost performance and suppliers relations, as they are considered to be more important on organizational sustainability.