Building the Digital Thread for Circular Economy Product, Resource & Service Management
CircThread is a four year Horizon2020 funded project which kicked off in June 2021. Two of our members, ZEOS (Slovenia) and Erion (Italy), are also involved alongside 31 project partners.
CircThread’s main objective is to unlock access to product data between stakeholders that is now in silo’s and utilise it for enhanced CE decision making across the extended product life cycle. The CircThread or Circular Digital Thread project vision is to deliver an ‘information broker’ marketplace software platform, where individual products will gain a digital identity with links to information in a publicly accessible ‘’catalogue’’, that can be easily requested and exchanged. The catalogue linked to the CircThread cloud ecosystem and a physical product tags, will enable mobile and desktop-based access for tracing and to retrieve and add information on-site. CircThread will thereby enable capture, link to, combine, and share both data and CE decision information as part of a collaborative information infrastructure, providing a Circular Product Chain of Custody.
Information covering product status logs and materials, resources, critical raw materials, substances, product lifespan, environmental, social, end-of-use options, that will be linked to Circularity Strategies, from products maintenance and lifespan extension, furthered by refurbishment repair and re-use, re-manufacturing, and finally recycling for secondary raw materials use. Each industry and its product-life-cycle partners can run their own platform version in the cloud, invite new partners to join, and ‘mix and match’ services at a low-cost fee. Yet, at the same time all product catalogues will also have a public digital access point, enabling 3rd parties to receive particular sets of information.