CircThread Project EU

Circular Economy (CE) provides a growth model based on material recovery routes, to ensure more of the materials stay in the economic loop, benefitting the sustainability of the economy and the environment. But at present, such opportunities are not yet fully exploitable in the absence of information sharing infrastructures among related stakeholders with associated decision-making support across a product’s life cycle. This is where CircThread takes action: our main objective is to unlock access to product data and enhancing it as a decision-making tool that can accelerate circularity and carbon emissions reductions for all actors within and outside the product life cycle. To do this, our project will deliver a methodology and framework to facilitate information flow exchanges across the extended life cycle chain of Products, their Components, their Materials, and Chemicals data, and their related Circularity, Environmental, Social and Economic Information. This linked data will be governed by secure and reliable management standards to create a product catalog that will be easily accessible via a cloud-based platform. We will implement the system 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 dishwashers) and home energy systems (incl. boilers, solar-PV systems, and batteries) to test 7 circularity use cases and associated business models. This project has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 Grant Agreement No. 958448