CIRC4Life aims to develop and implement a circular economy approach for sustainable products and services through their value and supply chains. Three new circular economy business models will be developed including (i) co-creation of products and services, (ii) sustainable consumption, and (iii) collaborative recycling and reuse. The Co-creation of Products/Services model will bring end-users closer to the design and manufacturing phases by identifying consumer preferences via Big-data online mining product reviews and evaluating product specifications and prototypes via Living Lab to customise the end-user requirements. Benefited from the co-creation features, sets of sustainable production methods will be implemented and new products/services will be created.
The Sustainable Consumption model will develop a method to calculate the eco-points of products based on the outcome of FP7 myEcoCost project, assess product environment footprints (PEF), provide a traceability solution to monitor product’s sustainability along the value chain, and support end-users and stakeholders to actively implement the circular economy via awareness raising and knowledge sharing activities. The Collaborative Recycling/Reuse model will develop a system for stakeholders to interact with each other to facilitate the use/reuse of end-of-life products and reduce waste, and implement the eco-credits awarding scheme to encourage people to recycle/reuse. This project will be demonstrated at a large scale in electrical and electronic products and farming/agri-foods sectors, provide an effective means to communicate with wide communities to disseminate the project outcome, and involve a large number of stakeholders along value and supply chains throughout the project lifetime, including end-users, producers, researchers and civil society. An ICT platform will be developed to support the development, implementation, demonstration, communication and dissemination.
CEPS participates across most Work Packages, with an emphasis on policy implications and recommendations. As part of Work Package 8 CEPS develops a mapping of policies in the EU and the countries where the demonstrations take place, in order to analyse the interaction between policies and the implementation of circular economy practices, including barriers and enablers.
