The world's natural resources are under significant pressure – without strategies to reduce the amount of material being used and products being consumed, the UN has warned of total societal collapse. The circular economy offers a solution by using 70% of current materials, redefining waste as a resource, and providing environmental and financial benefits, including unlocking up to $140 billion in the Nordics alone by 2030.
To realize this potential, businesses need a deeper understanding of their value chains. This requires collaborative data efforts, as no single company can see the entire lifecycle of materials and products. While companies can optimize their operations individually, only systemic data sharing can scale circular solutions and realize their full value.
Businesses across value chains – from Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations – face major roadblocks in sharing circular data. Companies struggle with unclear business incentives, complex, overlapping legislations, unclear compliance requirements, and inconsistent data standards. SMEs, in particular, lack the resources to meet new sustainability reporting demands, while global value chains require harmonization across regulations.
To overcome the barriers, the consulted companies and strategic advisors of the Nordic Circular Accelerator Program propose policy makers to address three strategic objectives – each with a subsets of concrete interventions that incentivize and enable circular data sharing, harmonize and scale the efforts, and support and strengthen businesses.
