Circular Economy Taxonomy Workshop - CircularPSP

Mission: CircularPSP aims to solve the common challenge of municipalities to transition towards a circular economy (CE). Through CircularPSP, eight leading CE-cities and regions are to launch a competitive tender for technical solutions aiming to overcome organisational, informational and operational barriers. However, multiple standards and taxonomy related issues are universal and should not be solved in parallel. Instead, CircularPSP seeks to involve key stakeholders, leading companies, and academics to tackle the following issues together:

• Define core terminology (i.e. taxonomy) to ensure different AIs are not adding to the confusion over circular economy but lead to more clarity
• Identify a set of core data sources for AIs to ensure that the learning does cover all relevant circularity areas in a city instead of being dominated by the most advanced value chain or region etc.
• Document a core set of data standards and protocols to ensure the intended scalable solutions are fit for purpose to operate in a field with diverse IT eco-systems.

Having advanced on these aspects will directly help municipalities in coordinating their effort and improve the solutions to be developed by suppliers. Based on this initial result and experience gathered during CircularPSP, we will further seek to advance on easily applicable and transferable indicators and benchmarks.

Focus are the challenges of municipalities (or procuring organisation) - including their inexperienced staff - in contrast to efforts aiming to standardise business value chains. Though these viewpoints are not mutually exclusive, the needs of the ‘demand side’ are currently not sufficiently covered.

Format: The work will be conducted as an open Working Group. Any interested party is welcome to join and contribute at events and at any time in a living document which is to evolve over time with initial push coming from CircularPSP or voluntary contributors. Permanent members will be the CircularPSP consortium and all selected suppliers. The online "living" file will be maintained and versioned by the CircularPSP consortium. Versions will trigger follow-up events (2-4 per year) to update on developments and resolve contradictions etc.

• The first meeting is to lay out the white paper and cooperatively set out to initial classifications in which contributions are required.
• The initial phase will focus on 'collection and definition' of terms and data sources to cover circular economy, enabling AI holistically.
• At a later stage, the taxonomy will be extended by (selected) classifications used in the EU taxonomy to enable regulation.
• Where possible benchmarks - going beyond minimum requirements or boundaries - will be added as complementary information.

Starting point: An initial White Paper to be shared with registrants lays the ground for the Working Group describing the overall challenge, status quo, principles that should be followed and issues which can and should be tackled within CircularPSP regarding taxonomy, standards and data sources.

Free use of results and validation during CircularPSP project: The results of the working group will be applied and tested by all suppliers of the CircularPSP solution in particular through their AI. The CircularPSP tender will be released in November and is open to all parties. Further, all parties are free to use working group results during ongoing and upcoming standardisation efforts and to contribute to the dialogue on circular economy. In such case, a reference and notification (or tagging) of the project is appreciated.

Agenda workshop 21 September 2023 10-12 CET

• CircularPSP project (objectives and opportunities) - EMP
• Background and principles (i.e. White Paper) - RISE
• Working Session - Taxonomy: Categories, Terms and definitions (example CE-strategies) - ALL
• Working Session - Data Sources: Fields and classifications - ALL
• Q&A