Utilisation of digitalisation in sustainable manufacturing and the Circular Economy

Sustainability has nowadays become a mainstream issue and has started to gain the attention of companies and operators in all sectors of the economy. However, while the theoretical concept of sustainability and the associated tool of the circular economy (CE) have been fully examined by scholars and policymakers with regard to both their goals and objectives, there is an ongoing debate regarding the operational tools which enable these difficult goals to be attained. Moreover, in recent decades, a new “player” has appeared on the market: IoT and digitalisation. These represent disruptive challenges for enterprises, and they are contributing to new forms of business and management models. This contribution aims to examine the role of digitalisation in fostering sustainability within companies, considering that, in order to determine whether processes or products are sustainable, it is necessary to rely on accurate datasets, which make it possible to guarantee real-time monitoring of processes, as well as to assess the company’s environmental profile over time. The chapter will therefore concentrate its attention on how digitalisation can support and interact with environmental management tools for products and processes, with specific reference to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environmental Management Systems in accordance with international standards.