Product data is crucial to establishing and operating a circular economy, enabling informed decision-making, and measuring corporate performance.
However, a lack of clarity on how to account for and share this data is hindering companies from capitalizing on integrating greater circularity into their processes and portfolio. Without standardized product-level data, businesses struggle with inconsistencies and inefficiencies across value chains.
Although regulatory demands for product circularity data increase (e.g. ESPR), inconsistencies across standards and sector-specific guidance complicate how circularity data is defined and thus accounted for. This lack of consensus is causing ever greater fragmentation for business and their value chains, with siloed approaches further hampering data comparability and compatibility. In the absence of high-quality data inputs, businesses risk generating outputs that are equally unreliable and/or misleading.
A harmonized approach to consistent, comparable credible circularity data enables companies to:
• Assess (the impacts of) their product portfolio, including product end-of-life
By adopting a harmonized approach to circularity data, companies can unlock economic value, streamline operations and enable innovation through improved product design.
The Circularity Data Exchange (CDX) seeks to enable the exchange of consistent, comparable and credible product circularity data across global value chains. This will allow data to flow across the business ecosystem (including ‘downstream’ and ‘upstream’ flows).
CDX is being developed to enable the data exchange mechanism called on under Global Circularity Protocol for Business (GCP), supporting companies gather the necessary data to compute the GCP’s circularity and impact metrics, reporting and, disclosure guidance.
