Investigating the Potential of Technologies in Circular Economy’s Rebound Effect Dimensions

Circular economy (CE) is a production and consumption model for closing material loops based on reducing, reusing, and recycling resources to achieve benefits. Currently, CE is widely adopted in manufacturing, under the name of Circular Manufacturing (CM). Nevertheless, the effectiveness of circular strategies could be hampered by the occurrence of the rebound effect (RE). RE is defined as an undesirable increase in the consumption of resources due to improved efficiency. The identification and prevention of the occurrence of REs is crucial to ensuring the effectiveness of CM strategies. Despite growing interest in this topic, there is still limited knowledge on how to cope with the RE of CE. To this concern, this paper aims to detect the most suitable technologies to prevent the occurrence of RE while adopting CE. To address this objective, a systematic literature review has been conducted to identify and assign technologies (classified in the four reference groups driving the adoption of CM) to each of the five dimensions of the CE-RE domain (i.e., business models, drivers, product lifecycle management, circular manufacturing ecosystem, and socio-economic aspects). Therefore, the detected technologies could be exploited by researchers and practitioners to cope with the different RE mechanisms.