Dr. Devrim Yazan
Associate Professor, IEBIS Department, University of Twente.
Transition to a sustainable and resilient Circular Economy (CE) requires an acceleration as resource scarcity and depletion represent economic risks and waste overproduction threatens environmental ecosystems and societal wellbeing. Traditional take-make-use-dispose based on a linear economy paradigm is unsustainable, triggers resilience problems, and causes pressure on local and global supply chains, governments, and consumers. Although the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations recommend CE transition (CET) as a global priority, a large variety of barriers (e.g., non-circular product development, insufficient renewable energy use, unsustainable consumer behavior, lack of efficient policies) slow down this transition. Companies, citizens, and governments need to cooperatively take action for a successful CET and develop integrated stakeholder engagement. From educational perspective, the future CE awaits its implementers who have diverse backgrounds but complementary skills and a commonly shared vision. This requires educating students in an interdisciplinary environment where they can experience individual stakeholders’ challenges and produce collective and mutually beneficial solutions to contribute SDGs. In this context, there shouldn’t be only individual engineers, marketing experts, policy-makers, product designers, consumer psychologists, etc., but visionary problem-solvers who understand the needs of all stakeholders independently from their core expertise to collaboratively reach SDGs. To teach students above-mentioned challenges, the development of an online serious game environment supported by challenge-based learning perspective is a perfect fit. In such edutainment environments, students can experience different stakeholder roles to cooperatively tackle sustainability and resilience challenges at micro, meso, and macro levels. In this seminar, we will discuss the establishment of an online "Sustainable and Resilient Circular Economy Laboratory" which contains multiple plug-and-play game modules addressing the challenges of the sustainable and resilient circular economy transition. How future game modules can be collaboratively developed together with colleagues from various research streams will also be discussed in order to address current and future challenges within cross-cutting and complementary streams in our teaching activities.
Devrim is an interdisciplinary scientist in the fields of sustainable supply chains and circular economy. He conducts research in the fields of industrial symbiosis, circular and sustainable business models, information-sharing platforms and smart decision-support tools as enablers of circular economy transition, and sustainability of energy, construction, and bio-based industries. He teaches courses on Circular Sustainable Business Development, Sustainable Supply Chains, Circularity Management & Technology and Game of Circular Economy Transition and coordinates the interdisciplinary minor of Circular Economy Transition. Devrim serves as the resilience theme chair of the BMS Faculty since November 2022.