A Research Of Integrated Circular Economy Pattern

With the escalation of the conflict between the environment and economic development, a revolutionary development pattern, circular economy with the characters of lower energy consumption, lower material consumption, lower emission and pollution has become an inevitable option in the future. Therefore, the key problem of circular economy is how to put ecological consciousness into the behavioral norm of economic subjects to achieve regional sustainable development. While as the primary approach to incorporate consciousness and behavior, the pattern has been a hot research topic for a long time. The attempts to build a ecologically efficient circular economy pattern could make great contributions to the regional economic and social sustainability. From the perspective of industrial environment management and on the basis of both theoretical and empirical studies, the dissertation creates a new circular economy pattern on the region level, named the integrated circular economy pattern. The main contents of the dissertation are as follows:First of all, based on literature review, a conceptual and operational framework of the pattern is proposed. In the pattern, various economic subjects in industrial cluster cooperate on "supplier-client" contracts and "trust-commitment" relationships to achieve a highly efficient utilization of resources. The material foundation is the production, by-product and waste in the production and consumption. The material flows undertake ecological function of leading industry on the basis of cleaner production, which depends on ecological cooperation and competition in specification chains. Furthermore, they also flow between the correlative industries and thus, improve the ecological efficiency of the industrial clusters by binding the industries more closely. Consequently, an ecological network incorporating "enterprises—leading industries—correlative industries—industrial cluster—region" is established by synthesizing ecological factors into regional economic and cultural systems which rely on the radiation effect of industrial clusters in regional development.Secondly, after defining the behavioral characteristics of the integrated circular economy pattern, a path-forming theoretical model following the chain of "behavioral characteristics—enterprise internal factors—market-orientated factors" is proposed and verified with the samples of Chinese manufacturing enterprises. The results indicate that the enterprise internal factors are significant to the formulation of the model, while the market-orientated factors do not influence behavioral features significantly. Meanwhile, market factors positively affect the dimensionalities of enterprise internal factors. Furthermore, the abnormal results are analyzed and the related managerial implications are also discussed.Thirdly, by understanding the connotation and characteristics of governance, the governance structure and mechanism of the integrated circular economy pattern is elaborated. From the structure view, it analyses the subject diversification, right borderline and their cooperation. On this basis, a co-governance model made up of government, enterprise, intermediary service agency, institutions of high education and research, and communities was presented by identifying subjects and their functions. Finally, the dissertation concludes with the discussion of interaction mechanism between various subjects.