Moving from linear to circular apparel economy in Sri Lanka: PRISMA-based analysis of circular economy and supply chain interactions

The apparel industry is one of the largest and most resource-intensive industries in the world in terms of the resources necessary for the production process, as well as energy consumption, waste and carbon emissions. Circular economy (CE) can be considered as one of the critical success factors for developing the closed-loop supply chain. However, limited research that examines the applicability of CE to the apparel industry, this study aimed to address this gap by exploring the interactions between CE and apparel supply chain through PRISMA-based analysis of key literature. The systematic literature review procedure was adopted in this study, and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed as the methodological basis. A total of 116 articles were included in the review and Scopus-based tools, VOSviewer, R-studio and Biblioshiny software were used for the bibliometric mapping. The results reveals that the number of journal publications has been increased throughout the past decade, and the “Journal of Cleaner Production” has emerged as the prominent journal in this research domain. Next, the interactions between CE and the apparel supply chain were reviewed as key implication of the research. Accordingly, this paper provides a comprehensive synthesis of existing literature on the interaction of circular economy and apparel supply chain and serves as a basis for future research in this field. Since this research is a primary step of a research project, a closed-loop apparel supply chain model will be developed as a way forward.