Bridging the gap between circularity assessment and data governance

To effectively contribute to more sustainable industries, ensuring proper circular economy (CE) performance assessment is essential. Measuring and managing circularity at various levels – product-level, company-level, supply-chain-level – require the collection and governance of diverse, heterogeneous, and fragmented data. These characteristics represent significant barriers to circularity assessment in the industry. Ongoing research seeks to address these challenges by exploring data-oriented frameworks such as the CirDEF, or through standards such as ISO 59040. The present paper investigates whether these frameworks are sufficient to overcome such barriers in industrial environments, in terms of data collection and circularity indicators measurement. As they are found to fall short in this regard, a method is proposed to leverage their contents towards a more systematic data governance and indicator framework. The research methodology consists of extracting quantifiable elements from available CE resources (e.g., frameworks, standards, directives) through a multi-step process: (1) selecting relevant sections for CE assessment, (2) excluding non-quantifiable content through units or regular expression analysis, and (3) reformulating the selected sections into collectable, measurable, and computable data. The method is applied to the CE-related standard of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the ESRS E5, demonstrating how corporations can continuously feed evolving business needs, such as driving sustainable product design, end-of-life management, and corporate reporting, by translating available resources into collectible data points and measurable indicators.