Enel Américas' visión
The circular economy is a new paradigm based on rethinking the entire economic model with a view to decoupling economic activities from the consumption of nonrenewable natural resources.
The implementation of this approach in Enel's business represents a fundamental choice at the strategic level of the Company that seeks to achieve competitiveness objectives in both economic terms and risk reduction terms while contributing to solving global challenges by prioritizing the environment.
Rethinking the development model from a circular perspective is, above all, an innovation challenge and involves ever-closer collaboration with the ecosystem. This awareness has led to innovations not only in terms of technology, processes, and business models, but also in broader terms of synergies between business areas within the Group and collaboration with all external counterparts.
For the result to be effectively transformative, the circular approach must inevitably span the entire value chain. To reduce the consumption of energy and non-renewable materials, it is necessary to take action on the resources used as inputs by shifting from non-renewable sources to renewable sources or recycled inputs. This also applies to reuse, exchange, or product-as-a-service models.
Enel's strategy is comprised of five pillars:
• Circular inputs: increase the use of energy from renewable sources and the use of renewable, reusable, or recycled raw materials.
• Useful life extension: to extend the useful life of assets, this pillar focuses on preventive or predictive maintenance actions and incorporating modular designs to facilitate assembly, reorganization, and disassembly, allowing easy repairs or replacement of parts in case of failure or allowing components to be reused at the end of their useful life.
• Product as a service: where the sale of a product is linked to a service. This product is designed for longevity, with characteristics such as high quality, durability, modularity, and repairability. This concept seeks to maximize the utilization factor and extend the useful life of products.
• Sharing platforms: by using information technologies, an underutilized asset is shared among multiple users, contributing to a collaborative economy and maximizing the use of the goods produced.
• New life cycles: incorporating new solutions such as reuse, repair, upcycling, remanufacturing, and recycling once the useful life of the goods is over, creating new opportunities to recover and recirculate materials.
