An Alternative Circular Business Model: Pineapple Waste for the Production of Textile Fiber for Rope Confection in Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a world-leading exporter of fresh pineapple; thus, it has the largest amount of pineapple waste. In general, pineapple cultivation produces a negative environmental impact, damaging protected areas of riverbeds, contributing to deforestation, increasing soil erosion, rising sediments in rivers, and affecting the landscape. In this work, a novel assessment of a sustainable business model that uses the pineapple leaf stubble waste for the creation of agricultural rope is proposed in order to address environmental and social issues in the rural community of the country. The decision to use this assessment was based on the methodology proposed by Veloz and Parada ( Veloz C, Parada O (2015) Procedures for the selection of ideas and sources of financing for enterprises. UNEMI Science Magazine), which evaluates different business ideas grounded on their comparison against different criteria to select a final entrepreneurial idea. Furthermore, in order to quantify different indicators of the project such as commercial, financial, and environmental viability, this work defines aspects related to the production process, requirements of raw material, equipment, and spatial elements. In addition to the replacement of polypropylene rope, the proposed approach integrates the workers’ association and the owners in the rope production process to create a greater social impact by providing job opportunities and economic benefits for the community. Finally, this circular business model has a product-level circularity indicator of 91% and an acceptance rate of 90% among the pineapple producers and the worker’s association as well as showing profitable results from an economic perspective.