From Ambition to Practice: Circular Economy Challenges and Opportunities in the Swedish Electronics Industry

Sammanfattning

The electronics industry is among the fastest growing contributors to global waste, and it is increasingly recognised as a key enabler for a circular economy to counteract the effects of resource depletion, e-waste and raw material dependency. There is an increasing policy ambition and academic debate on the circular economy in electronics but less is known about how Swedish electronics companies put these ambitions into practice. This thesis aims at filling this gap by examining the challenges and opportunities for implementing circular economy strategies in the Swedish electronics industry with an emphasis on reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling. It is a qualitative study following a total of 16 semi-structured interviews with actors along the Swedish electronics value chain, ranging from OEMs to EMS, recyclers, a science park and a municipal environmental authority. The sample is weighed towards industrial electronics, where the products are primarily business-to-business, long-lived, and subject to high reliability and trade-compliance requirements are high. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews, following the approach of Braun and Clarke (2006) and drawing on the Gioia methodology, supported by NVivo software. The empirical analysis was framed by a conceptual lens developed through a narrative literature review. The results reveal that the electronics industry in Sweden remains structurally linear, in that recycling acts as the default end-of-life route, while other value retention solutions, such as reuse and remanufacturing, are found in isolated examples. Barriers exist at several levels and are interconnected with regard to organisational, design and business model issues such as the lack of take-back systems, dependence on suppliers, design choices that limit recyclability, and uncertainties in the regulatory framework. Enabling factors include shared sustainability goals, regulatory drivers, second-life value recovery, and emerging traceability tools such as the Digital Product Passport. The study also identifies less-discussed dynamics like the dependency of EMS providers on OEMs for design, the tension between trade compliance and circular design and the conservative attitude of B2B customers in safety-critical sectors. The thesis adds empirical knowledge on implementation of the circular economy in industrial electronics and provides concrete leverage points for the ReLoop project and the industrial electronics industry in general.