Building the Digital Thread for Circular Economy Product, Resource & Service Management

Action on circularity is not taken when information and evidence is not available across the life cycle chain.

The CircThread project's main objective is to unlock access to data now in silo’s, and enhancing it as decision information for actors across and outside the extended product life cycle.

To do this CircThread will deliver a Circular Digital Thread methodology, a framework for facilitating information flow exchanges across the extended life cycle chain of Products, Components, their Materials and Chemicals data, and related Circularity, Environmental, Social and Economic Information.

The core is to create data linkages between product chain, value chain, asset chain and life cycle chains based on a Product information Catalogue, and enable information exchanges via data contracts governed by secure and reliable management standards.

The project will implement the system in Cloud Platforms in 3 demonstration clusters in Italy, Slovenia and Spain rolled-out across the entire extended life cycle chain of home appliances (incl. washing machines and dish washers) and home energy systems (incl. boilers, solar-PV systems and batteries) to test 7 circularity use cases and associated business models.

The expected impact for the work programme is to enable improved decision taking accelerating Circularity and Carbon emissions reductions including: i) Enhanced life extensions of products by better understanding of in use failures and maintenance needs, ii) improved understanding of the quality of end-of-life products for spare parts buy-backs to support right to repair, iii) improved assessment of circularity routes by waste management and recycling companies by delivering enhanced product composition data, iv) improved materials and chemicals tracing of products and components for safer products and identifying Critical Raw Materials cycles, v) Empowering decisions by citizens and citizen organisations by providing direct access to product performance information.