An Approach to Assessing Organisational Circularity Aligned with ISO 59020:2024, UNI/TS 11820:2024 and ESRS E5: A Case Study in the Steel Industry

The Circular Economy (CE) is increasingly recognised as a key strategy for achieving sustainable development, fostering more responsible resource management as economies move into a critical transition from linear to circular systems. Monitoring this shift requires robust and standardised assessment frameworks. Recently published standards ISO 59020:2024, UNI TS 11820:2024 and ESRS E5 provide guidance for a proper assessment of circularity. To provide a comprehensive circularity assessment, this thesis develops an integrated framework to collect and calculate the indicators defined in these standards, thereby streamlining and standardising the data collection process. Applying this framework, this thesis investigates the potential of publicly available organisational data to populate the circularity indicators through two complementary studies. The first evaluates the accuracy and completeness of publicly sourced data and its impact on the circularity, supported by organisational verification and validation. Findings indicate that while such data are sufficient for calculating individual indicators, it does not provide an accurate overall circularity score due to the reduced number of indicators that can be filled with that information. The second study extends the analysis to companies operating within the same sector, demonstrating that public data can provide a useful basis for cross-company comparability in circularity assessment. Overall, this thesis highlights both the opportunities and limitations of using public data to support emerging CE measurement frameworks. It also proposes a set of recommendations to enhance circularity reporting and data availability, thereby improving the reliability, comparability and practical application of organisational circularity assessments.