A Framework for Pairing Circular Economy and the Internet of Things

Abstract

This paper highlights the interplay between Circular Economy and Internet of Things, and identifies novel ways in which this interaction can drastically change the nature of products, services, business models and ecosystems. It emphasizes the potential of novel circular economy business models and service supply chains to unlock synergies in order to generate direct value for customers/end-users and to augment resource productivity across economies. Furthermore, we sketch an open, circular-by-design IoT architecture, where "smart" IoT objects are integrated in the IoT ecosystem with proven key circularity-enabling properties to maximize IoT resource and data harvesting in a new breed of circular-by-design IoT ecosystems.