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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To access business data for compliance monitoring of the circular economy (CE), governments would need to deal with issues of both legislative complexities arising from many new regulations in the area of CE and sustainability, as well as the digital complexity for accessing business data that resides in different business systems and data spaces. While earlier research has touched upon (1) the legal complexity through the identification of common high-level concepts of what to monitor, and (2) the digital complexities through the use of upper ontologies, so far these aspects have been treated to a large extent in isolation and not been linked systematically. In this research in progress paper, we propose an approach on how to link the two, discuss advances in the area and limitations, and identify areas that need to be addressed to allow governments to tap into the rich business data sources for compliance monitoring in the future.@en