Propostas da economia circular aplicadas a uma indústria de embalagens plásticas no Oeste paranaense

Abstract

Nowadays, the society is facing constant environmental problems. Nature has shown us that consumption patterns and increasing exploitation of natural resources are unsustainable for the maintenance of the planet’s ecosystem. In 2010, the Ellen McArthur Foundation presented a new concept called Circular Economy (CE), with the goal of disseminating the development of strategies to create a more sustainable environment. This model proposes that all unused products and their waste can be returned to the production system in a closed cycle, through a global change throughout the industry and in the society. The CE stands as a challenge to mitigate the problems generated by the already known Linear Economy (LE), where it’s based only on the processes of extraction, manufacture, use and dispose of materials. Therefore, this work is characterized as a case study with the objective of analyzing and proposing Circular Economy strategies in a plastic packaging company located in the west of Paraná, in Brazil. The research is divided into 6 stages, which are: (1) characterization of the company; (2) identification of the production processes; (3) mass and energy balance of the production process; (4) prospection of CE methods and techniques in bibliographic and technological databases; (5) systematization of the results presenting proposals for improvements related to the collected data and the seven pillars of Circular Economy; (6) action plan for implementation of the suggested proposals. As a result, the process inputs and outputs were analyzed, identifying the waste generated and the list of 26 applications of Circular Economy in the company, 16 of them how some new proposals from the reduction of the amount of waste, maximizing the use of raw materials, enabling financial and social gains for the company and its value chain.