The ‘Circular Electronics Hub’ Project aims to define an initial set of criteria/indicators to assess best practices, technological developments, public policies, regulations and standards in terms of their “circular transformation” potential (i.e. for understanding and ranking their transformation potential). The initial set of criteria/indicators will be shared and refined over time with you on this platform.

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The initial set of proposed criteria/indicators is relatively simple and stays at rather high-level: the main reason for that is to remind the various actors involved in “circular electronic” initiatives, the ultimate goal of circularity – i.e. to increase material and energy efficiency of the sector, from a holistic perspective.

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Oversimplifying, according to this approach, the “ideal” circular products (or categories of products, or sub-sectors, and so on) will be those for which:

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• Non-sustainable virgin materials in input are zero (we need to agree on what are “sustainable materials”, but this is one of the points of discussion for the Hub)

• Life-time of products is maximized

• Waste at end of life is zero (i.e. product components are recovered, and materials from product components that cannot be recovered are fully recycled)

• Energy use is optimized at each phase of the product lifecycle

• Negative externalities (GHG emissions and other aspects) are minimized at each phase of the product lifecycle [some of these indicators are not strictly related to “circularity” but address broader sustainability aspects: however, we believe it is useful to consider them for a better comprehension of circular electronics and its implications. In any case we will be more than happy to discuss].

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The initial set of indicators intend to capture the essential aspects outlined above. They do not cover directly solutions, approaches and aspects that can be adopted to achieve circularity: but only the end result.

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For example: “circular product design” is essential to achieve circularity – and includes aspects such as selection and processing of materials to allow for easy separability and recycling; adoption of advanced modularity and other features to allow for easy reparability and recovery of components, and so on. However, and here is the key assumption, at the end of the day, the effects of “circular product design” could be assessed by measuring the type of indicators outlined above.

We will certainly consider “secondary indicators” (such as reparability, reusability of components, and so on), as a means to achieve circularity – in our view, however, the latter should be measured according to the primary indicators.

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It is also important to clarify that, at this stage, we have made some significant simplifications (that should be corrected over time). The most important ones are the following two:

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• we have not considered the distribution/logistic phase (this could be important in terms of energy consumption and GHG emissions – however, it does not involve transformations of the products and we thought we could leave it out in first instance)

• we have also not considered the second-hand good market, which can also be very important. This is a destination (of secondary or primary importance, depending on a number of factors) of recovered products or refurbished product components: an additional loop to be considered after EOL – which, again, we thought we could leave out in first instance).