Scavengers – actors who collect and redistribute waste into circular ecosystems to reuse or recycle it – may improve resource availability and sustainability in the firms' procurement business process. In Closed-Loop Supply Chains, their role is crucial to the business stability. Indeed, governments and the private sectors are encouraged to formalize them, that is, to institutionalize and regulate them and to provide them with the appropriate organization, training, and infrastructures. Yet, to our best knowledge, the scientific literature has not empirically investigated how formal scavengers may advantage those firms that decide to involve them in their procurement process. To do so, a case study was developed in an Italian Pulp & Paper firm that operates in closed-loop settings and that integrated one formal scavenger into its own business to feed its paper mill – one of the biggest in Europe. The findings show that the introduction of the scavenger entailed four benefits: procurement risk mitigation, lower environmental impact, lower procurement costs, and better quality assurance. By considering conservative estimates related to purchasing the waste paper from the secondary raw materials market on a one-year time window, the scavenger has led to a 7.2 % reduction in the procurement costs and a 21 % improvement in the CO₂ emissions. Finally, implications for Supply Chain Management and policymaking were outlined.

清道夫——收集废物并将其重新分配到循环生态系统中以对其进行再利用或回收的参与者——可以提高公司采购业务流程中的资源可用性和可持续性。在闭环供应链中，他们的角色对业务稳定至关重要。事实上，鼓励政府和私营部门将它们正规化，即将它们制度化和监管，并为它们提供适当的组织、培训和基础设施。然而，据我们所知，科学文献并没有实证研究正式的拾荒者如何使那些决定让他们参与采购过程的公司受益。为此，在意大利纸浆和 在闭环环境中运营的造纸公司，并将一名正式的清道夫整合到自己的业务中，为其造纸厂提供饲料——欧洲最大的造纸厂之一。研究结果表明，引入清道夫带来了四个好处：降低采购风险、降低环境影响、降低采购成本和更好的质量保证。通过考虑与在一年的时间窗口内从二级原材料市场购买废纸相关的保守估计，清道夫使采购成本降低了 7.2%，二氧化碳排放量提高了 21%₂排放。最后，概述了对供应链管理和决策的影响。