Conference Agenda

Women’s underrepresentation in operations leadership is not a talent pipeline issue. It is a system design issue. The organizations that close the leadership gap will be those that examine and change how they structure roles, govern career pathways, manage culture, and define leadership - not those that only invest in developing individual women to fit systems that weren’t built for them. This brief highlights four structural barriers that consistently influence who gains credibility, visibility, and decision-making authority in operational roles: safety is not integrated into role design; career pathways assume a male life cycle; organizational culture perpetuates gender norms through informal gatekeeping; and leadership evaluation favors visibility over impact. These barriers work together and reinforce each other. The findings are based on ten in-depth interviews with senior women leaders from five different sectors and a participatory workshop with seventeen participants in Amman. The main strength of the study is the consistent results across sectors: barriers that appear in humanitarian, public, and private sector settings are systemic, not specific to one sector. The request is straightforward: view leadership system design as a governance duty. Review your role structure, career standards, sponsorship methods, and evaluation systems against the four barriers in this brief. Ensure accountability for addressing identified gaps.

Read Full: HELP-TL-Brief-Fix_the_System_Not_the_Women-Digital-20260323.pdf

Despite growing circular economy mandates across Europe, flat glass from the construction and demolition (C&D) sector remains one of the most underrecycled building materials (Glass for Europe, 2021). This paper investigates the systemic barriers that prevent effective reverse logistics for flat glass, drawing on a review of academic and grey literature to synthesise the current state of knowledge and identify priority areas for policy and industry intervention.

The study identifies four systemic failure points that collectively impede closed-loop supply chains for flat glass. First, collection and acquisition processes remain fragmented: flat glass is frequently co-mingled with mixed demolition waste, sharply reducing purity and recovery rates. Second, sorting and inspection infrastructure is underdeveloped Barriers are classified across technical, economic, organisational, and behavioural dimensions (Dekker et al., 2004). surface coatings, lamination layers, and contaminants make quality assessment technically demanding and economically marginal. Third, stakeholder coordination is structurally weak glazing contractors, waste handlers, recyclers, and float glass manufacturers operate in disconnected value chain segments with misaligned economic incentives. Fourth, behavioral barriers including low recycling intention among site contractors and limited awareness of available collection schemes produce an intention-action gap that persists even where physical infrastructure exists. These findings are interpreted through the closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) framework (Guide & Van Wassenhove, 2009), the operational taxonomy of reverse logistics (Dekker et al., 2004), and nudge theory applied to recycling behaviour (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008; Miafodzyeva & Brandt, 2013).

This paper offers the first structured, multi-dimensional barrier synthesis specific to flat glass in the construction sector. Prior research has addressed glass recycling in broader contexts container glass and post-consumer cullet but has not systematically mapped reverse logistics constraints for architectural flat glass. The four failure point framework provides a structured diagnostic lens that can guide extended producer responsibility (EPR) policy design, reverse logistics network configuration, and targeted stakeholder engagement strategies.

The findings call for mandatory material separation requirements in demolition contracts, subsidised collection and sorting infrastructure for glazing waste, and nudge-based communication campaigns targeting contractors and site managers. Policymakers are encouraged to extend existing EPR frameworks currently focused on container glass to cover flat glass from the built environment.

Circular economy is increasingly discussed as a means of improving the environmental performance of logistics and supply chain systems. Yet, circular economy approaches in both research and practice are still frequently associated with recycling, recovery, waste management, and end-of-life treatment. This perspective risks underrepresenting non-recycling R-strategies that are deployed earlier in the product life cycle and seek to prevent resource use, extend product lifetimes, or maintain the functionality and value of products and components before material recovery becomes necessary.

This paper examines selected non-recycling R-strategies in circular supply chains, while recycling and recovery serve as reference points within the broader R-strategy spectrum. The paper conducts an integrative literature review, synthesizing selected research on circular economy, R-strategies, value retention, circular supply chain management, and environmental sustainability. First, the review consolidates the current state of knowledge on the R-strategy spectrum by bringing together different perspectives from the literature, including life-cycle stages, value-retention levels, and circularity logics.

Building on this conceptual overview, the main analysis links selected non-recycling R-strategies to supply chain processes. For this purpose, the paper uses the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model as a structuring framework and examines how the selected strategies relate to the process areas Plan, Source, Make, Deliver, Return, and Enable. This allows the analysis to identify which supply chain processes and operational capabilities are particularly relevant for the practical application of different non-recycling R-strategies.

Finally, the review provides a concise ecological reflection on the proposed classification. Rather than conducting an empirical impact assessment or life cycle assessment, it discusses how the identified supply chain processes and operational requirements may help explain why circular strategies are not automatically environmentally beneficial and why their relevance depends on the specific context of application.

By connecting the current state of knowledge on the R-strategy spectrum with a SCOR-based analysis of selected non-recycling R-strategies, the paper contributes to a more differentiated understanding of circular economy beyond recycling and recovery. It outlines two directions for future research: the empirical environmental assessment of non-recycling R-strategies and the analysis of strategy-process combinations across circular supply chain contexts.