Promoting Circular Economy in the shipping industry

ABSTRACT With a focus on sustainable development, industries around the world have been encouraging Circular Economy to decouple economic activities from consumption of resources. This has motivated existing materials and products to be shared, leased, reused, repaired, refurbished, and even recycled with an interest of using them for as long as possible. While this concept has taken root in most industries, it is still in the nascent stages in the maritime industry. Since the maritime industry is the backbone of the existing infrastructure of world trade, it has become imperative for the maritime industry to adopt the concept of Circular Economy to ensure their growth in a sustainable manner. Accordingly, the maritime industry has adopted some aspects of Circular Economy such as shipbreaking for recycling, emission control through decarbonisation, and reuse of material. With these notwithstanding, the industry has found it difficult to indoctrinate the true principles of Circular Economy due to issues such as disparity of information amongst suppliers and plurality of designs for ship components, to name a few. The paper thus aims to discuss the existing limits and challenges and the possible methods of promoting the principles of Circular Economy in the shipping industry for achieving sustainable growth.


Introduction
With an aim to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and wastage of natural resources while ensuring overall sustainable development as proposed by the UN through their Sustainable Development Goals − 2030 (Panchal et al., 2021), industries around the world have been encouraging Circular Economy (García-Sánchez et al., 2021) by decoupling economic activities from consumption of resources that are otherwise finite.To achieve this, the focus is primarily on promoting sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible (Kirchherr et al., 2023).
The maritime industry is a complex sector that relates to waterborne activities and encompasses construction, repairs and scrapping of vessels, transport and logistics of cargo and other material and regulatory, engineering, finance, and insurance activities of this sector that are both vertically and horizontally interconnected (Ghaderi, 2020).Since this industry is known to be slow and resilient to change (Agarwala, 2022c), it has kept itself aloof from adopting this concept.However, this industry is the backbone of the existing world trade infrastructure and needs to necessarily adopt the concepts of Circular Economy to ensure its own growth in a sustainable manner.This has forced the maritime industry to adopt some aspects of Circular Economy through the concepts of Ecological economics (shipbreaking for recycling), Environmental economics (decarbonisation for pollution control), and Industrial ecology (by employing industrial symbiosis to achieve sustainability in both port and hinterland to reuse waste as raw material for manufacturing new products and applications) (Ghisellini et al., 2016).However, the maritime industry has found it difficult to indoctrinate the true principles of Circular Economy in the shipping industry due to issues such as disparity of information amongst suppliers, use of non-standard products, and the plurality of designs for ship components, to name a few.
It is with this understanding that the article aims to discuss the existing limits and challenges and the possible methods of promoting the principles of Circular Economy in one of the sectors of the maritime industry, namely, the shipping industry, for achieving sustainable growth.
In order to do so, the paper will first introduce the concept of Circular Economy before discussing the research undertaken in the maritime domain and the unaddressed areas of research in the shipping sector.This would be followed by understanding where and how the concept of Circular Economy can be promoted in the shipping industry.The concerns disallowing the implementation of Circular Economy in the shipping industry will be addressed next before providing a possible way ahead and conclusion to the study.

Background
The life cycle of any product in general can be represented through four eccentric circles, each circle representing reuse, remanufacturing, recycling, and disposal as seen in Figure 1.As we move from the inner to the outer circle, the requirement of resources and energy increases.This essentially means that our efforts should be concentrated on maximising the time spent by the product in the inner most circle.For final disposal, use of the product for energy generation should be the second to last option, while disposal through landfill should be considered as the last option.
Accordingly, the concept of Circular Economy aims to retain a product in the inner most circle to maximise reuse and encourage sustainable growth.It is a concept that has been promoted by the EU and several nations and businesses to provide a sustainable alternative to the existing unsustainable economic system.The resulting economic flow is proposed to be cyclical in nature that would eventually reduce the negative impacts on the environment and help stimulate new business opportunities.The concept emphasises the reuse of products, components, and material through remanufacturing, refurbishment, repair, cascading, and upgrading.To ensure that the concept is sustainable, the energy input is recommended to be from renewables -solar, wind, and waste-derived processes -throughout the product value chain (Korhonen, Nuur et al., 2018).The biggest change that the concept proposes is the concept of cradle-to-cradle unlike the existing cradle-to-grave concept.Effectively, the concept encourages an item to continue in service either as part of the original product or in some other form but with minimal additional energy input to transform the product (Ekins et al., 2019).
By using the concept of Circular Economy, the transformed economy will become one that is regenerative and that innovates to reduce waste and its impact.To implement the concept there is a need to design new processes and solutions to ensure that the use of the existing resources that are finite is optimised and reliance on them is decoupled.The framework of Circular Economy is established on three pillars driven by design changes.These pillars are those of eliminating waste and pollution, keeping the product and materials in use as long as is possible, and make efforts to regenerate natural systems.This concept of Circular Economy is not unique to humanity.In the 19 th century, waste was used as a resource for economic activities.Before the Industrial Revolution, the municipal waste management facilities in Western Europe were considered as material recovery facilities wherein the sorting and sieving of the waste was done manually and would produce secondary raw material.With time, the concept of recycling was replaced with the concept of use and throw.The reduction in use of recycled copper from 63% in 1970 to 33% in 2008 is an example of reduction in waste recovery system over the years (British Geological Society, n.d.) as a result of changing philosophies with changing times.As sustainable development became an area of concern, the concept of Circular Economy (CE) caught the attention of researchers.The resulting studies can be divided into three distinct historical phases (Okorie et al., 2018).The first phase of 1970-1990 (CE 1.0 (CE 1.0 where the 3 R concept of "reduce, reuse, recycle" was dominant), the second of 1990s-2010 (CE 2.0 that focused on eco-efficient output measures and prioritized cleaner production and industrial ecology), and the third CE 3.0, of 2010s onward that shifts from geographically close entities to the supply chain with close connection of Circular Economy with reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain management (Reike et al., 2018).While CE has been studied for many years now, their use in the maritime industry has been reported as in the initial stages of development.This has thus created a major gap in the literature.Furthermore, since Circular Economy is not well understood in the maritime industry, the sector has mostly focused on recycling.Since recycling is well established in the shipping industry, it disallows the industry to think beyond, whereby disallowing the full potential of Circular Economy to be achieved as recycling is the lowest in the hierarchy of End-of-Life of a ship when considering Circular Economy as seen in Figure 1.
As an area of study in maritime studies, Circular Economy was first discussed by Gilbert et al. (2014) and Mansouri et al. (2015).It gained prominence after 2018 when Carpenter et al. (2018) and Wahab et al. (2018) published their articles.The study shows that if Circular Economy goals and strategies are adopted, maritime transport can contribute to SDG 6 (clean water for all), SDG 7 (clean energy), SDG 12 (responsible consumption), and SDG 13 (climate change).Hence, as Circular Economy in maritime industry increases, it will require faster information sharing using digital tools (Ranta et al., 2021).However, studies exploring Industry 4.0 technologies are limited and represent a major research gap.
A study undertaken by Razmjooei et al. shows that the publications related to Circular Economy and Sustainable Maritime have increased from the 1970s to 2021 with most of the publications originating from the USA, China (PRC), England, and South Korea.The study predicts that research dealing with these studies will continue to grow in the next few years.Amongst these studies, the themes in order of importance identified were ship cycling, slow steaming, sustainable shipping management, analytical network process, energy saving, ship-breaking, and Circular Economy.It was noted that studies on Circular Economy have been on the rise since 2013.
One realises that even though the shipping industry is the backbone of the world trade infrastructure and needs to ensure sustainability for its own growth, studies towards ways and means of adopting the concepts of Circular Economy in the shipping industry have been limited.To address this gap, this work aims to discuss the existing limits and challenges and the possible methods of promoting the principles of Circular Economy in the shipping industry.

Circular Economy in the shipping industry
The approach to Circular Economy is rooted in three factors.These include the Ecological economics (with a tradition in recycling), the Environmental Economics (that focuses on air, water, sound, and oil pollution), and the Industrial Ecology (that encourages reuse of waste as a raw material for manufacturing new products and applications).For the shipping industry, these three factors have been adopted to some extent.The old and decommissioned ships are subjected to shipbreaking, and the steel, cables, pipes, woodwork, and other items have been recycled for many years now, with Bangladesh and India being the leading ship breaking centres of the world (Rousmaniere & Raj, 2007).Similarly, the effort towards decarbonising the maritime sector is another area that has been an area of focus for the maritime sector especially after the adoption of the Paris Agreement by the IMO (Agarwala et al., 2021), while marine pollution from ships is covered and enforced by MARPOL 1973 (IMO, n.d.).The third concept of Industrial Ecology has been initiated to a limited extent through the reuse of waste such as decommissioned containers used as raw material for new containers and other products thus achieving sustainability in port and hinterland through symbiosis (Cerceau et al., 2014).

Drivers promoting circular economy
Studies show that the transformation towards Circular Economy is driven by digital technology supported by the data generated, development of new platforms and new market actors (Jensen et al., 2021).Accordingly, the growth of Circular Economy in the maritime industry and hence the shipping industry too is encouraged by these drivers.While the digital technology encourages communication, operations, and connectivity, the synthesis of the data generated from digitalisation of platforms has helped develop uncrewed vessels and Smart ships (Agarwala, 2023).Numerous disruptive technologies as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution have encouraged numerous new technologies into the maritime domain that are changing how ship design, ship production, and ship operations are being conducted (Agarwala, 2022c) and how ports can become Green (Agarwala, 2022b).Some of these technologies such as digital twins, 3-D printing, Virtual reality, Augmented reality, 5 G technology (Agarwala & Guduru, 2021), and Artificial Intelligence have become the backbone for Maritime 4.0 and Port 4.0, thereby improving the efficiency of the maritime industry as a whole in the conduct of business.This increased digitalisation is encouraging decarbonisation of the shipping industry and has been an area of detailed studies in recent times (Agarwala et al., 2021) including by changing fuel used (Agarwala, 2022a).

Areas of implementation
While numerous drivers exist in support of promoting Circular Economy in the maritime industry in general, and particularly for the shipping industry, most of these technologies cannot be implemented directly due to the existing industrial norms and procedures in vogue.These limitations and challenges notwithstanding, the Circular Economy can be implemented in numerous areas of the maritime industry categorised by the port sector and the shipping sector.Both these sectors are interlinked due to their common interface and have their own nuances for implementing Circular Economy.
Broadly, the activity of implementing Circular Economy in a port can be categorised at three levels.These include micro level (reusing waste within own company), mezzo level (industrial symbiosis between two or more companies within the port), and macro level (creating inter-regional industry network to exchange recycled resources) (Faut et al., 2023).These activities are concentrated in economic, logistic, and industrial areas and focus on secondary ports, maritime transportation, and maritime supply chain activities as seen in Figure 2 (Notteboom et al., 2022).This concept has been adopted with some success by the Ports of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Southampton, and Gavle (Razmjooei et al., 2023).
For the shipping sector, the Circular Economy would need to focus on ship design, ship production, ship operations, ship repairs, and maintenance and end-of-life cycle for machinery and equipment (Tola et al., 2023).Eventually, the resulting transition would impact how ships are designed, constructed, operated, maintained, and recycled and how they are owned and valued.When drawing out the interconnections between the various players in the shipping industry as seen in Figure 3, one notices that the shipping sector too like the product cycle discussed in Figure 1 has eccentric circles of transition which are spread over the shipyard design, OEM dealer, OEM, shipyard repair and maintenance, and the ship operators.While there are numerous stakeholders, the resulting transition towards the desired Circular Economy needs to adhere to the guidelines promulgated by the regulators, classification societies, and policymakers from time to time (Millios et al., 2019).

Circular Economy for the shipping industry
From the preceding discussion, one notices that the areas for implementation of Circular Economy in the shipping sector are numerous.Of these, ship-breaking, decarbonisation, and marine pollution have been discussed in detail by various researchers and do not require further deliberations.Since ship construction, operations, maintenance, and repairs especially of machinery and equipment have a long-term impact, implementing CE to the ship's operational cycle, remanufacturing, and reuse of her machinery and equipment is considered critical to ensure a sustainable shipping industry.Accordingly, implementing CE during the ship's construction, operational life cycle, maintenance, and repairs of machinery through remanufacturing and reuse will be discussed herein.

Circular economy in shipping
A ship by nature is a complex system made up of numerous sub-systems.To account for the number of components in a ship, during design, a Product-Oriented Work Breakdown Structure System (PWBS) is used.This system focuses on the product to simplify handling and accounting for the numerous ship systems.However, this breakdown does not focus on the product components.Since it only provides a broad picture of the ship systems, it is considered inadequate for the concept of Circular Economy which works more at the component level.Hence, to implement Circular Economy, there is a need to account for ship systems at the nut and bolt component level for the entire ship.
As discussed, Circular Economy for any product needs to begin at the design stage itself.For a ship too, it is no different and hence, the inclusion of Circular Economy for ships would need to begin at the design stage prior to her construction.Since the present system used in ship design and construction is the PWBS system which is considered inadequate to achieve Circular Economy, this system needs to be refined and expanded to the level of nuts and bolts for the entire ship.To account for all ship components to the level of nuts and bolts, a product datasheet of the material used in the vessel at the time of design, subsequently updated over her entire lifetime, would need to be created.This datasheet needs to be unique and updated regularly when changes and upgrades to equipment or machinery are encountered.The design so prepared and the retrofit undertaken during the life cycle of the ship should evolve from this datasheet alone.If the equipment is a new upgrade or an invention, then the datasheet would need amendment accordingly.Since this datasheet is envisaged to consist of unique items, it can be considered as a material passport (Hoosain et al., 2021) akin to the travellers' passport used for visiting nations.
While the concept of material passport was first introduced by Damen (2012), and is referred to by a number of other names which include product passport, resource passport, recycling passport and cradleto-cradle passport, its use is still in its infancy.Since the expected gains from this methodology to achieve Circular Economy are numerous, this technology needs to be pushed to a higher level (van Capelleveen et al., 2023).The advantage to creating a material passport for ships (Matthias & Lang, 2019) is that it would encapsulate nearly 95% of the ship's weight wherein every nut and bolt would be accounted for, thereby encouraging easier reuse and safe disposal when processing the ship at its end-oflife.In addition, the availability of a material passport would encourage involvement of third parties for certain high-cost components to contribute by means of lending their components on rental basis.This form of third-party involvement would in return ensure their involvement in the design process to ensure value retention of their component and ensure correct and stipulated disassembly process to encourage automation during disassembly.It would additionally encourage digital documentation of the material to retain value, improve efficiencies, extend product life, and optimise product use (Yawar & Kuula, 2021).
To create such a material passport, the OEM, subvendors and sub-sub-vendors, shipyard, ship operator all must play their respective roles (Okumus et al., 2022).Since most OEMs provide equipment to other industries as well, a material passport would help map common items in other industries, thereby ensuring easier and quicker availability of spares when required.It is important to mention that the erstwhile USSR followed this nature of material passport in their manufacturing industry, which allowed the same part to be used for various products and allowed a control on the availability of spares (Freedman & Gorozhanina, 1971) while keeping a check on the inventory to be maintained.Today, such a systematic control of spare part manufacture is available with an OEM but is lacking within and across sectors and across geographical boundaries of nations.

Circular economy in remanufacturing and reuse
Repairs are an unfortunate outcome of the exploitation cycle of the equipment.Most equipment repairs are addressed through replacement due to the cost associated with down-time and relatively low spare part cost.This is extenuated by the non-availability of entrepreneurs to undertake remanufacture (Charter & Gray, 2008).Even though cost-benefit analysis of remanufactured engines shows that the acquisition cost of such engines is nearly half the cost of a new engine with similar operating performance and operating cost (Smith & Keoleian, 2008), remanufacture has not become an industry norm to date.To encourage remanufacture, it is essential to standardise the product across manufacturers.Furthermore, there is a necessity that the remanufacturing entrepreneur displays innovation and a certain degree of knowledge and skill base to address complex materials as used in the shipping industry.Such an effort would build faith in ship owners and ship-operators to use remanufactured components.
With many of the engine OEMs establishing worldwide remanufacturing centres and facilities with several take-back strategies (Okumus et al., 2023) the scenario of remanufacturing through the OEM is on the rise.To improve the existing remanufacturing base, partnership with OEMs is considered essential along with ensuring regular replacement of parts during routine surveys as part of preventive maintenance.Such an effort would prolong the life of the marine equipment and delay the need to recycle the product.In effect, it would save material resource, labour, and energy for the industry, thereby encouraging sustainability.
Today, several remanufacturing strategies such as closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) and recovery hubs, seeding, and take-back strategies through trade-in or leasing and product service strategies exist (Okumus et al., 2023).These strategies need to be encouraged and adopted to ensure that remanufacturing becomes an accepted and a primary norm in the shipping sector.

Implementing circular economy in the shipping industry
A ship in many ways is a "made-to-order" item which is built to the projected requirements of the prospective owner only when an order is placed.This makes the industry less flexible in terms of standardisation and hence retrofitting if and when required to meet the changing regulations.While difficulties exist and are well understood, the need for embracing Circular Economy for achieving sustainability cannot be overlooked.
As seen in Figure 3, the stakeholders of the shipping industry include the owner, the shipbuilder, ship operator and the ship maintainers, and equipment suppliers and maintainers.It is imperative for each of these stakeholders to ensure that their demands and decisions are driven by the concept of Circular Economy by minimising new, unique, and one-off items and hence difficulties in life-cycle management.While one may say that such an approach will curb innovation and new designs, the thought is not entirely true.On the contrary, it would ensure refinement of the existing design for greater efficiency.
The designer, on the other hand, has an important role in ensuring that the items and spares used in the design are standardised items and do not demand special design or manufacture.Although this concept is considered a standard norm and is encouraged by Classification Societies, there may be numerous times and moments when use of standard items may not be feasible.In such a case, efforts need to be made by the designer to alter the design to the extent possible to avoid non-standard items and if unavoidable, then ensure that a minimum number of non-standard items are used.This essentially implies that standardised and modular design needs to be encouraged to ensure that the ship can be retrofitted and maintained with greater ease.Such a design would encourage Circular Economy by ensuring that the module is available for use by various platforms.
Even though the owner and designer may ensure that non-standard items are not integral to the product manufactured, the same needs to be ensured by both the builder and repair agencies.It is imperative to mention that in order to ensure timely delivery and availability of the ship, the shipyard and ship maintainer may be forced to use non-standard items which would subsequently lead to unsustainable life-cycle management of the vessel.This thus needs to be avoided.If operationally essential, it should be recorded and reverted to the original at the earliest opportunity.
To ensure that such a standardisation is achieved and maintained, a detailed list of items used in the product needs to be documented to prepare a Material Passport, which will provide a master list of items used.Subsequent repairs and product manufacture would use this documented list to encourage Circular Economy.Furthermore, documentation would need to be undertaken for the ship from cradle-to-cradle.This includes upgrades and fitment of new equipment to ensure that the full details to the extent of nuts and bolts are defined and known to all concerned during the entire life-cycle of the ship by updating the Material Passport.This would assist easier maintenance and improved recycling and scrapping practices, thereby encouraging Circular Economy in the shipping industry.

Limitations of the concept
Although the Circular Economy is considered an encouraging method to achieve sustainability for the planet, it is considered merely a concept and a collection of vague ideas from several fields developed and led by practitioners (policymakers, businesses, consultants, associations, foundations, and governments) (Korhonen, Honkasalo et al., 2018).It hence becomes important to understand the limitations of the concept and possible means of addressing these limitations to achieve the much desired sustainability in our businesses.

Concerns in implementing circular economy
As the concept of Circular Economy lacks scientific or research content, it raises several concerns that make implementation challenging.Some of these concern areas are as follows: (a) Ensuring global sustainability.The shipping industry uses a number of resources.If any of these resources defy the ethos of global sustainability, the resulting efforts of the shipping industry may be considered as a nought.Say, for instance, the energy used.If the energy used is from unsustainable means such as non-renewables, then the product produced is also unsustainable, which makes the entire process to defy the principles of Circular Economy.(b) Understanding the thermodynamic limit of a product.Since energy usage generates waste and side-products it is essential to develop a detailed understanding of how much energy should be used and at what stage, to minimise waste.If this is not done, the resulting quantity of waste would be high and the process unsustainable.(c) Check the resulting increased consumption.As manufacturing efficiency increases, production increases and cost per item reduces.This encourages greater consumption, which in effect is contrary to the ethos of Circular Economy and offsets the environmental gains achieved by improved efficiency.(d) Relationship between the supplier, customer, and producer.For the shipping industry, it is not clear as to who is the leader in the entire process, who has the maximum responsibility, who loses the most, who contributes the most, and who is the main contributor and the controller in achieving Circular Economy.Without this knowledge, it is difficult to define the point wherein Circular Economy can be implemented.(e) Future of poor and developing nations.Since the poor and developing nations lack the wherewithal for implementing Circular Economy, the resulting response of implementing Circular Economy across the shipping sector needs to be debated.(f) Definition of waste.Since the term has a social and a cultural definition, it is looked down by some.Hence, use of waste as raw material for a product may not be accepted by many, thereby creating dissatisfaction amongst users and derailing the implementation of Circular Economy.Thus, without a clear definition of the term "waste," it is difficult to assess the good or bad environmental impacts of both material and energy.(g) Involvement of stakeholders for implementation of this concept.Since the existing global supply chain is extensive, it is difficult to implement Circular Economy without the whole-hearted and dedicated involvement of the entire manufacturing environment, which in the present competitive market seems complicated.

Addressing known concerns
Largely, the areas of concern in achieving Circular Economy are due to lack of knowledge amongst stakeholders and the way the manufacturing industries presently operate.While the focus has begun to shift to use of sustainable means and techniques, this focus is limited to our own produce without considering the sustainability component in the raw material for the industry.Although one may say that if each industry is sustainable, then both downstream and upstream industries automatically become sustainable.While this is conceptually correct, one needs to realise that our manufacturing industries even today remain rooted in the principles of the Industrial Revolution, which have evolved from unsustainable methods and process of using fossil fuels.Hence, until this entire chain is not disrupted, the overall process cannot become sustainable.This in effect means that while aiming for sustainability for the shipping sector, we need to ensure sustainability in the corresponding sectors too.If the burden of unsustainability is shifted from one sector to another, the net effort would not be sustainable.To achieve this, it is essential that all processes used in the shipping industry directly or by the raw material used need to be made sustainable.While this may not be feasible due to both technological and systemic limitations, it is essential that a sincere effort is made and processes and procedures put into place to ensure sustainability of all industries.Unfortunately, this goes against the principles of the existing global manufacturing process wherein the developed use the underdeveloped nations for core and otherwise polluting manufacturing processes to reduce their own carbon footprints.
A bigger concern herein is that for poor nations.Nations that are struggling for basis sustenance does sustainability mean anything?If it does not, can they be expected to focus on sustainable manufacturing processes?Even though many such unanswered questions demand answers, they are currently unavailable and vary from nation to nation based on their own commitments.
Since the range of materials used in shipbuilding is unique, a detailed understanding of metallurgy and the impact of heat input on such materials is a must to ensure that the heat utilised and the resulting material wastage are kept to a minimum.Since effective utilisation of resources is the backbone of Circular Economy, reduced material wastage becomes imperative and needs to be given due importance.Similarly, the concept of repair by replacement which encourages increased consumption and higher waste needs to be reviewed to achieve the desired sustainability.In doing this, the gains and losses of the process followed and the relevant stakeholders involved need to be identified and mapped explicitly.It is only such a mapping that would help identify the key player that would need to be focused upon to implement the concept of Circular Economy.
Yet another concern area is the definition of waste, which is more of a social issue and demarcates the rich and the poor, the developed and the undeveloped.While rich nations despise the use of old material, it is seen as an important resource by the poor.Since Circular Economy emphasises the use of used products and hence waste, a change of mind set and how waste is defined and utilised needs to be promulgated and implemented over the world to ensure making manufacturing more sustainable.
This thus requires a whole-of-stakeholder approach without which achieving true Circular Economy is difficult.In doing so, it requires that industries accept a reduction in profits by standardisation, thereby allowing interchangeable parts to reduce inventories and encourage easier maintenance, which would encourage Circular Economy.
As mentioned earlier, since the concept of Circular Economy is not based on science, implementing and acceptance of the concept by the industry is slow and not forthcoming.However, as the focus of the world on sustainability increases as a result of diminishing resources and increased impact of climate change, it is a matter of time before Circular Economy would be embraced by the industry with open arms.Until then, increased awareness would encourage overcoming the existing inertia of acceptance of the concept and make humankind future ready.

Way ahead
While the concerns and their possible solutions as discussed in the previous section may sound discouraging, the need for adopting Circular Economy in the shipping sector to ensure sustainability and effective utilisation of the available resources is considered essential.This thus requires that the concepts of the likes of "Material Passport" need to be implemented globally cutting across governments, sectors, and industries to ensure that the available natural resources are sustainably utilised with minimum wastage.This in return necessitates creation of greater awareness amongst the public to eventually force manufacturers across the globe to look at standardisation and accepting the concept of material passport.Furthermore, it is essential that the concept of growth of a nation should no more be gauged on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but on sustainability parameters.This would force governments and businesses to be transparent about their circular activities and acknowledge conditions that need to change for activities to be sustainable.
With these notwithstanding, there is an urgent need for greater scholarship in the field of rules and precise technical specifications for reclaiming equipment and machinery and in the role of the OEMs, independent manufacturers, and shipyards for implementing Circular Economy.With greater scholarship, greater understanding and hence acceptance will emerge.This in return would allow the presently disjoint industry to work in greater unison to achieve greater sustainability for the planet.

Conclusion
Even though Circular Economy as a concept does not have the backing of scientific studies (Korhonen, Honkasalo et al., 2018), it is considered a promising concept that aims to encourage the business community to sustainable development work.As a concept, it makes business sense to ensure that a product is used to its maximum capacity before it is recycled or disposed.This would permit reduced use of virgin material, reduced waste generation, and reduced energy use for recycling or disposal.To achieve true Circular Economy, as desired, we need to first engage in a need analysis and a product impact analysis to evaluate the need for the product.Once the need is established then cheap and dirty pathways should be recognised and avoided for economic advantage while preserving the natural capital to the maximum extent during manufacture and utilising the process of cycling and recycling to the maximum.
While the maritime industry has been slow in adopting the Circular Economy, which has otherwise been a part of the other industries for many years, discussions and studies such as these are positive steps to ensure the adoption of Circular Economy in the shipping industry to achieve sustainability and address the issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and wastage of natural resources.