To facilitate the transition toward a circular economy (CE), EU policymakers are drafting new policies and legislations at a high speed. This affects a wide set of sectors and leads to legislative complexity. At the same time, the legislative developments requiring Digital Product Passports (DPPs) offer opportunities for governments to tap into a rich set of business supply chain data for CE and sustainability monitoring. Nevertheless, the diversity of these legislative initiatives leads to complexity for governments on what needs to be monitored. There is a need to reduce legislative complexity, to have a more clear view on what governments need to monitor, which in turn would provide more clarity on the types of business data from the Digital Product Passports and digital infrastructures governments may need to access for CE and sustainability monitoring purposes. One approach to reduce the legislative complexity is to have a framework of high-level concepts for CE and sustainability monitoring. The question, however, is how to arrive at such a framework of high-level concepts. In this paper, we explore the potential of the concepts found in the UN Recommendation 46 (initially developed for the traceability of textiles), to serve as a basis for a generic framework of high-level concepts for CE and sustainability monitoring. We examine the suitability by applying the concepts from UN Recommendation 46 to a variety of legislations beyond textiles. Our analysis suggests that the framework has the potential to serve as a high-level framework of CE and sustainability monitoring concepts across sectors, and we identify several areas for further research.

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The European Commission initiated a series of Directives and Regulations that aim to turn the linear economy into a climate-neutral and circular economy. Business-to-government information- sharing arrangements play an essential role in monitoring compliance with these regulatory measures. To this end data from the supply chain of products needs to be combined to create a full picture of the product life cycle. This requires the design of data-sharing arrangements in which businesses and governments share data. The EU proposal to introduce the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) obliges EU importers and non-EU exporters to buy carbon certificates for goods imported into the EU Customs Union. Upon implementation, the CBAM will require monitoring activities by the EU Custom Authorities. We use the case of the import of steel for the EU automotive industry to explore the required data, scenarios for (voluntary) data sharing, and the role of (future) digital infrastructures for e-government. Our analysis shows that data sharing for compliance with the CBAM Regulation is relatively simple. However, if Customs Authorities need to go beyond the monitoring of single regulations, the situation becomes more complex. In addition, the diversity of data sources owned by a network of actors in different (future) digital infrastructures will increase. Future research needs to go beyond data-sharing solutions for monitoring single regulations for circular economy towards combined data sharing for multiple regulations. This requires alignment between public and private interests to limit the administrative burden for businesses and government and an assessment of which digital infrastructures developed can be used to support data sharing. @en

In this paper, we propose a framework for circular economy monitoring by looking at the issue of border crossing and levels of control.@en