Evaluation of critical success factors for transition to circular economy: Case of Turkish tourism industry

Current economic system shows a linear pattern that consists of taking natural resources, making, and consuming products. This pattern causes the exhaustion of limited resources of our planet and creation of an excessive amount of waste. Circular economy is a model which was introduced as an alternative to the linear economy, and it has started to gain a global acceptance. The main purpose of the circular economy is closing the loops by using the waste produced by the production and consumption processes as a resource for the new products. This purpose would allow firms to create the same amounts of products by consuming lesser virgin resources and breaking the pressure on the prices of the resources. While the number of articles about the topic of circular economy is increasing, it is seen that the significant portion of these articles focuses on the manufacturing industry. The research examining the relationship between tourism industry and the circular economy is very limited in the literature. In addition to that, the number of research on circular economy in Turkish literature is also very limited. The primary purpose of this thesis is to introduce the circular economy, which has been ignored in the Turkish literature so far and provide a source for any stakeholders interested in this topic. This thesis is also expected to contribute to the academic literature by examining the circular economy from the tourism industry perspective. In this research, 8 critical success factors for the transition processes of tourism companies to the circular economy was determined by extensive literature review and their relative importance were determined by using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy AHP method. The results state that, 'commitment and leadership of top management' is the most important critical success factor among the 8 critical success factors for a successful transition.