Search Results (2)

Nowadays, more and more business organizations are encouraged to find ways to produce high-quality products that are offered to users for their temporary enjoyment and then redistributed or sent to the next user pending. This is done without being conditioned to believe that we need to own something, use it for certain functions for a limited amount of time, and then throw it away. Toys are a perfect candidate for this approach. Given the lack of case studies explaining how companies can design and implement a circular economy in practice, especially in the toy industry, this study aimed to develop a case study based on Evertoys, a start-up operating in Romania, which is a country where the circular economy is only in an infancy phase. This study’s objective was to analyze this business model from the circular economy perspective. Regarding the methodology, the work followed the research strategy of the case study, which was developed by analyzing the opportunities and challenges of this toy-as-a-service model and taking into consideration the components of the Business Model Canvas. Our findings indicated the presence of driving factors, as well as barriers, in the implementation of circular economy practices. Full article

Electrically assisted bicycles are anticipated to become an effective tool to limit not only the use of cars in cities but also their negative impact on health, the environment, and passenger transportation in cities. In this paper, we examine the effects of implementing the first fully electric bike (e-bike) sharing system in the Metropolitan Area of Gdańsk–Gdynia–Sopot in Northern Poland, where no other bike sharing system had been introduced before. The aims of this article were to determine the impact of the new e-bike sharing system on the modal choice of citizens, identify barriers to its usage, and find differences between the usage of the system in the core of the metropolitan area and in the suburbs. We used two primary data sets: the survey data collected using the computer-assisted personal interviewing technique (CAPI technique) and the data automatically acquired from the website that monitored the system activities. We performed the analysis by using nonparametric tests and correspondence analysis. We found no evidence suggesting that e-bike sharing can replace large number of private car trips, but we found it likely to be competitive to carsharing, moped, and taxi services. E-bike sharing competes also with public transportation services, but it is also used as the first/last mile of the transportation supplementing public transport system. The major barrier to using this system in central cities of the metropolitan area was the lack of available public bikes, and possession of private bicycles, whereas for residents of the suburbs, the obstacles were the need to transport children, the high price of the bicycle rental/subscription, and the long distance to the docking stations. Full article