# At the Nexus of Blockchain Technology, the Circular Economy, and Product Deletion
## 2 Background
### Product Deletion  
Companies invest vast monetary and time resources launching new products, leveraging product portfolios, and acquiring rivals all seeking a competitive advantage. Managers are engrossed with product line extensions and proliferation, channel extensions, and supplier development while seeking to cater to their customer segments [37]. Complex and broad product portfolio strategies attract customers but do not necessarily sustain profitability [38]. Surprisingly, rarely do companies examine their product portfolio and doubt if they might be housing too many products. Product deletion, or killing, is perceived as a less appealing management activity when it comes to product portfolio management [39]. The inescapable fact is, for most companies, some products are not making a profit and drain valuable resources [40]. Managing them is sometimes more challenging than developing them; and keeping them requires more effort than killing them [41]. However, discontinuing or withdrawing these lagging products from the product portfolio is not necessarily a trivial decision. For example, deleting a specific product may negatively influence the market for the associated maintenance services that may have created financial value for the company. The product deletion decision can affect strategic and operational concerns including customer satisfaction, profit margin, market building, and supply chain relationships management [41; 42]. Material, information and capital involved in products are important flows within supply chains [43]. Companies are interlocked in these chains to serve a market; these chains involve suppliers, channel partners, the government, employees and consumers. Products, components, and materials with their associated transactions flow through raw material sourcing, internal manufacturing, storage, transportation delivery, and end-user consumption in the forward chain. There also may be reverse logistics activities such as reusing, recycling, reclaiming and remanufacturing [42]. Close-looped product activities are necessary for a circular economy. Product deletion can be defined as discontinuing a product from a product portfolio; deletion can occur at the product level (complete deletion) or product variate level (partial deletion) [41]. In this paper, product deletion mainly focuses on complete deletion--kill a product and most of its key components. This paper is one of the few papers that relates product deletion to supply chains in a CE environment, taking the perspective of original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Given this supply chain environment, product deletions have implications on circular economy operations; in turn, circular economy activities and actions can influence product deletion decisions. The traditional linear economy presents a \"make and dispose\" model of product production. Within this model, when a product is deleted, its inventory will immediately become obsolete and transform into waste. It may be disposed, sometimes to third parties for resale purposes; or disposed of in a traditional fashion into landfills. In a circular economic system, deleted product inventory and their finished components may be reclaimed as input in resource, energy and material loops through remanufacturing, refurbishing, reusing and recycling [44]. Product deletion may become, in the short-term, profitable not only from more rationalized product portfolio management, but also from the utilization of freed up resources and materials as closed-loop inputs [45]. The circular economy's focuses on design thinking, systems thinking, and product life extension influence the product deletion decision. Product deletion occurs for many reasons, including customer complaints on performance issues, product defects and quality concerns. Long-lasting designs help to decrease the likelihood of occurrence of such issues, hence, also decreasing the likelihood of product deletion [41; 46].