Beschreibung
The economic growth of China faces the increasing pressures like natural resource shortages, environmental pollution and the growing costs of raw materials. Transition towards circular economy is therefore considered as a new strategy, to adopt reduction, reuse and recycling concepts in the process of production, circulation and consumption.
Transition towards circular economy is of high complexity. Multi-interactions among many actors and subsystems are very different and complicated under each local context. Methods for systemic analyzing of transition mechanism have heretofore remained largely unexplored. This dissertation attempts to study the transition mechanism towards circular economy through establishing a cybernetic model of material flow management.
This model reveals the transition mechanism based on identifying the multi-interactions among five subsystems, namely, the material flow subsystem, the information flow subsystem, the decision and policy subsystem, the money flow subsystem and the action subsystem. In the model, each subsystem is both generated and restrained by two of the other subsystems, with both positive and negative feedback loops. Based on the degree of coordination achieved among the subsystems as the transition towards circular economy develops, the model further identifies transition phases of pre-development, take-off, acceleration and stabilization.
The model was tested in three case studies for diagnosing transitions towards a circular system of regional organic residues flow (RORF). The German case study indicated that the formation of a circular RORF resulted from the good coordination of multi-interactions among the five subsystems enumerated above. The two Chinese cases, in Guiyang municipality and Luxia Township, identified weak coordination degree of multi-interactions and concluded Guiyang is still in the pre-development phase and Luxia is in the take-off phase towards establishing a circular RORF. Reinforcing an effective information flow about source-separated collection systems for biodegradable municipal waste, utilization of organic fertilizer and clean development mechanism among various key actors is recommended for influencing the decisions and policies subsystem and thereby promoting the formation of the desired money flow subsystem and action subsystem for the transitions towards a circular RORF in China.