Circular business models, such as product life extension and resource recovery, can reduce the energy security risks associated with the supply of minerals and metals essential for the deployment of green technologies. For the planning of concrete actions, metrics are essential to assess the current system’s status and enable prompt monitoring of progress towards a model aligned with the circular economy as a reference paradigm.

Within such framework, the research activity had the objective of updating the circularity metric for the national electricity sector (macro-scale analysis), proposed within the 2019 – 2021 Ricerca di Sistema activities to obtain a monitoring framework characterized by indicators linked as much as possible to official statistics and which satisfy the criteria of relevance, acceptance, credibility, ease and robustness.

The review of the metric allowed to develop a new framework for quantifying circularity that is simpler and more effective than the one previously proposed. The new framework analyses aspects relating to policies to support circularity, flows of materials, energy and waste and environmental sustainability through indicators based mostly on official statistics. Based on the circularity score obtained, electricity systems can be classified as “beginner”, “started”, “concerned” and “circular”.

The tool was applied to the Italian electricity generation sector with reference to 2021. Based on the assumptions and selected indicators, the study showed that the national electricity generation sector is a “concerned” system in the circular transition path.

The research activity represents an innovative contribution in the literature relating to the evaluation of the level of circularity of electrical systems. The updated framework allows for rapid acquisition of the data necessary for its application. However, the importance of having a continuously updated computerized system for the rapid acquisition of data covering all dimensions of circularity is underlined.

The Report is available on the Italian site