Background Throughout its evolution and diversification, our industrial economy has hardly moved beyond one fundamental characteristic: a linear model of resource consumption that follows a ‘take-make-dispose’ approach. Companies harvest and extract materials, use them to manufacture a product, and sell the product to a consumer, who then discards it when it no longer serves its purpose. For most materials, the rates of conventional recovery after the end of their first-functional life are quite low, when compared with primary manufacturing rates. A linear system not only demonstrates a very inefficient use of natural resources, but disposal of a product in landfill means that all its residual energy is lost. The incineration or recycling of discarded products recoups a small share of this energy, whereas re-use saves significantly more energy. The use of energy resources in a linear production model is typically most intensive in the upstream parts of the supply chain - i.e. the steps involved in extracting materials from the earth and converting them into a commercially usable form. Much of this energy can be saved in a system that relies less on upstream production. Whilst major strides have been made in terms of improving resource efficiency and exploring new forms of energy, less consideration has been given to the idea of systematically designing out material leakage and disposal. A circular economy – by contrast - is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the ‘end-of-life’ concept with restoration, a shift towards the use of renewable energy, and it aims to eliminate waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and business models. Objectives The LIFE+ CEMs project aims to demonstrate that the concept of a circular economy offers a practical alternative to the traditional waste-generating, resource-inefficient linear approach. Specifically, it seeks to design and develop a web-based tool to enable European businesses to measure their effectiveness in moving towards the circular economy. It thus hopes to encourage a shift to a circular approach. Key aims of the project are to develop metrics for measuring the circularity of both companies and individual products. For example, this might be a performance score out of 100, based on aspects such as the need for new raw materials, the generation of waste, etc. The project will create an online tool that companies can use to calculate the metric for a product. Although it is not planned to be able to develop a similar tool for the company-level metric at this stage, the project team will start to investigate what would be required to deliver such a tool in the future. To demonstrate that the product-assessment tool and related metrics can deliver real performance improvements in practice, the project will work with participating companies to test their implementation. They will work to identify actual and projected environmental and economic performance improvements through a set of key performance indicators such as savings in waste, energy and cost. They will also look to develop a good understanding of how the metrics could be applied in other fields and how they can be used to inform future policy-making. Expected results: A tried and tested generic methodology for measuring how well a product performs within the context of the circular economy; A tried and tested generic methodology for measuring how well a company performs within the context of the circular economy; An open source, unrestricted publication of the two methodologies; A tried and tested online tool for calculating the product-level circulatory metric; The technical scoping of an online tool for calculating the company-level circulatory metric; A completed quantitative assessment of the environmental and economic benefits that could accrue from a large-scale adoption of the metrics.