CIRCONOMY is an EU-funded project supporting Europe’s transition to a circular economy by developing practical, harmonised micro-level circularity indicators to better measure and understand circular resource use at local levels.
CIRCONOMY helps Europe move faster towards a circular economy by making it easier to understand and measure how resources are used and reused in everyday life. Today, most available data on circular economy performance is too general to help local authorities, companies, or citizens take practical action.
CIRCONOMY is developing a new way to measure circularity using clear and practical indicators that work at local level. These indicators will be integrated into a simple digital tool designed to help municipalities, businesses, and households understand their impact and identify ways to improve.
The project combines scientific research with real-world needs, bringing together environmental studies, social sciences, and digital technologies. This ensures that the tool is both reliable and easy to use across different countries and contexts. The tool will be tested in real situations with municipalities, companies, and other stakeholders to make sure it works in practice and can be widely applied.
In addition to the tool itself, the project will provide training materials, practical guides, and workshops to help people and organisations apply circular economy principles in their daily decisions. It will also support evidence-based decision-making and policy alignment, helping ensure coherence with key European frameworks and strengthening the link between circularity metrics, governance, and policy development.
Ultimately, CIRCONOMY will make circular economy concepts more concrete and actionable, helping Europe better track progress towards climate, biodiversity and broader sustainability goals.
CIRCONOMY is a project funded under the call HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-CIRCBIO-06. UnitelmaSapienza is the project coordinator.
The role of Cittadinanzattiva in the project
CIRCONOMY is a three-year project funded by the European Union, carried out in collaboration with 17 partners from various European countries and coordinated by Unitelma Sapienza. Cittadinanzattiva is primarily involved to act as a bridge between the project and civil society, focusing on citizen engagement, the study of household behaviors, and social inclusion. In addition to providing an overall and cross-cutting contribution to the project’s activities, Cittadinanzattiva is specifically involved in implementing the Italian pilot project aimed at consumers: the indicators identified in previous phases will be tested on at least 20 households, with a particular focus on behaviors such as waste sorting, reuse, and sustainable purchasing. Activities will include 1 co-design workshop, digital diaries, and feedback dashboards to investigate citizens' habits and motivational barriers, testing micro-circularity indicators in real life.
Project ID: 101289977 – CIRCONOMY - HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-CIRCBIO-06
Duration June 2026 – June 2029
Contact:
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Exceutive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
