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

Project description

A circular view of a product’s life cycle

Closing the loop of product life cycles through greater recycling and reuse is a priority in line with the EU’s ambitious transition to a circular economy. In this context, the EU-funded CircThread project will focus on data and information management to support the circular economy. More specifically, the project will support decision-making processes by promoting access to existing data. It will design a methodology for sharing information about the different stages of the products’ life cycle, focusing on environmental, social, economic and circular aspects. The overall goal is to create data linkages between product chain, value chain, asset chain and life cycle chains. Circularly use cases will be tested in Italy, Slovenia and Spain.

Objective

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.

Call for proposal

H2020-LOW-CARBON-CIRCULAR-INDUSTRIES-2020

See other projects for this call

Sub call

H2020-LCCI-2020-EASME-twostage

Coordinator

FUNDACION CARTIF
Net EU contribution
€ 592 750,00
Address
PQ TECNOLOGICO BOECILLO 205
47151 Boecillo
Spain

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Region
Centro (ES) Castilla y León Valladolid
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 592 750,00

Participants (36)