Towards a Service Marketplace to Empower Circular Economy Transition: An Example Application in the Supply Chain of Textile Industry

The environmental impact of the textile industry is driving a shift towards circular economy (CE) practices. The EU’s 2022 strategy mandates the Digital Product Passport (DPP) for textiles, which requires environmental and circularity data along the value chain. To comply with DPP, it is necessary to use digital services for CE in supply chains to assess the environmental impact of textile products. CE services require addressing interoperability issues and facilitating data exchange between these CE services used by different companies for their individual products. Although various CE services are available as commercial off-the-shelf products, they are often provided with a generic data model for a specific product and significant effort is required by SMEs to address customisation. Existing service marketplaces are either not domain specific or do not facilitate easy (re-)use and adoption of these CE services. This paper proposes a marketplace to address this challenge. It connects solution providers offering CE services with SMEs seeking solutions. The marketplace implements Software as a Service (SaaS) and provides public APIs and domain & product specific data connectors to facilitate data exchange and interoperability between individual services from companies and CE services in the marketplace. This will minimise the effort required to discover, deploy and use CE services within SMEs, and facilitate the (re)use of CE services across different products. With this, the marketplace aims to promote sustainability and traceability in the circular economy of the textile sector, which is shown for the Preferential Certificate of Origin.