Standards research on the Circular Economy

As part of the development of the standardization roadmap Circular Economy, DIN, DKE and VDI began by conducting a broad-based search for existing standards in order to analyse the status quo of the current standardization landscape in relation to the circular economy.  The aim is to provide experts from the circular economy with a practical, thematically sorted selection of relevant standards that can help to enable a circular economy. 

For this standards research, the entire national and international body of standards was scanned and evaluated for relevant circular economy standards. A total of 280 sets of rules with over 700,000 current references were researched, making it the most comprehensive standards database in the world. Current projects were added, so the overview is very comprehensive. 

The research yielded a large amount of basic data. DIN, DKE and VDI manually checked this basic data from the standards research for relevance to the circular economy. As a result, 2101 norms and standards were identified as relevant to the circular economy. To make it easy for you to select and use this large number of relevant standards, the content was assigned to the seven key topics of the Circular Economy standardization roadmap.  

In addition to the thematic assignment of individual standards according to the main topics and their sub-topics, the visualizations can be filtered according to individual regulations to facilitate the search process. (Via the drop-down menu at the top left next to the pie chart). 

The basic data set was extracted from the database in January 2022, the last revision status of the search is from 19.09.2022. The complete Circular Economy standards search is available for download here.