Promoting Circular Economy in the shipping industry

ABSTRACTWith a focus on sustainable development, industries around the world have been encouraging Circular Economy to decouple economic activities from consumption of resources. This has motivated existing materials and products to be shared, leased, reused, repaired, refurbished, and even recycled with an interest of using them for as long as possible. While this concept has taken root in most industries, it is still in the nascent stages in the maritime industry. Since the maritime industry is the backbone of the existing infrastructure of world trade, it has become imperative for the maritime industry to adopt the concept of Circular Economy to ensure their growth in a sustainable manner.Accordingly, the maritime industry has adopted some aspects of Circular Economy such as shipbreaking for recycling, emission control through decarbonisation, and reuse of material. With these notwithstanding, the industry has found it difficult to indoctrinate the true principles of Circular Economy due to issues such as disparity of information amongst suppliers and plurality of designs for ship components, to name a few.The paper thus aims to discuss the existing limits and challenges and the possible methods of promoting the principles of Circular Economy in the shipping industry for achieving sustainable growth