The Circular Economy Indicators Coalition (CEIC) has launched an online Circular Indicators Library on Circle Economy’s Knowledge Hub. The library consists of a curated collection of circle economy indicators that financiers can employ to track the circular performance of their investments.
The first set to be released contains around 50 indicators, methodologies and resources for banks to measure the circularity of investments and loans to businesses, in addition to measuring their social, economic and environmental impacts. The library informs investment decisions by helping financiers evaluate businesses' circular performance against reliable and meaningful benchmarks.
One example from the library’s latest indicator set is ‘product recyclability’, measured in percentage of the total weight of materials used in ‘designed for recycling’ products or services. The criteria for considering a product ‘designed for recycling’ includes low material complexity, low toxicity and ease with which product materials can be separated.
With this new tool, the CEIC is making circular indicators accessible to users globally and enabling them to pinpoint the most relevant examples linked to regulations, target groups and clusters. The coalition will continue adding new indicators to the library, including those geared towards policy and labour market analysts.
The Circular Indicators Library adds to the practical resources developed by the CEIC, a collaboration between the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE) and Circle Economy. The coalition strives to harmonise and increase the application of circular indicators worldwide to steer the circular transition and assess the impact of circular economy interventions.
With multiple challenges, ranging from limitations in indicator coverage to data availability and collection, the field of circular economy metrics is still in its infancy. The CEIC responds to this challenge by collecting meaningful circularity indicators and working towards their wider acceptance, for example, in governments and corporate target-setting.
The library was noted in the United Nations Environment Programme’s report, ‘Guidance on Resource Efficiency and Circular Economy Target Setting’, as a source of circularity criteria.
The Circular Indicators Library is part of Circle Economy’s Knowledge Hub, the largest circular online library in the world. It currently contains over 5,000 circular economy case studies, reports and policies. The Knowledge Hub is a collaborative co-creation project.
