Paper-making Enterprises Value Chain Optimization Based On Circular Economy

With the environmental pollution increasingly becoming a serious problem on the sustainability of economic development, the Chinese government has proposed various regulations and policies in pollution control in many high polluting industries. Paper making is one of them with both high energy consumption and destructive pollutant discharges. Small and medium sized paper making enterprises usually fail to benefit from economies of scale in production under the circumstances of circular economy. Hence, it is eager for these enterprises to find solutions to strike a balance between environmental and operational requirements. And this study makes an attempt to find such solutions.This thesis is developed in the following way. Firstly, it summarizes the existing knowledge on circular economy, enterprise value chain, discusses remanufacturing and reverse logistics. Secondly, it discusses the current states and general features of China’s paper making enterprise, and analyzes the approaches to optimize every component along the value chain of the paper making industry based on circular economy. A conceptual model framework is established to generate global optimization along the value chain. Finally, a case study on a small paper making enterprise is introduced to carry out a simulation of implementation on value chain system optimization.This thesis emphasizes the theoretical analysis on both partial and global optimization of papermaking value chain, and the case study serves as practical verification of this theoretical model. In this way, this study is expected to provide insights on theoretical and practical guidance to paper making enterprise for value chain optimization.