Attaining Sustainable Development Goals through embedding circular economy principles: Evidence from food processing small- and medium-sized enterprises in India

Various industries are gradually sifting away from the linear economy and toward the circular economy (CE), but its advancement is crawling far behind the environmental contamination by the food processing industry in developing countries. Hardly any research analyzes the CE performance of food processing small- and medium-sized enterprises (FPSMEs) in an emerging economy context. Hence, developing a CE performance evaluation framework is imperative to facilitate this transition. This research proposes a comprehensive framework for evaluating CE performance based on three real-world cases of Indian FPSMEs. Initially, 15 essential criteria are shortlisted from the literature and refined by the experts. Afterward, data are collected through questionnaires administered to experts and structured interviews. Next, this research employs a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)-based approach, in which the Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method is used to compute the objective weights of criteria and the Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method is used to determine the performances of FPSMEs and rank them accordingly. The results reveal that "investment in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)," "use of renewable energy," "increase in scrap recycling rate," "total CO2 emission," and "total water consumption" are the top five criteria for CE performance. Investment in CSR emerges as the most influential criterion for strategic corporate transformation, which blends the notions of CE and CSR as a feasible solution for designing circular business processes.