Businesses urged to link circular economy guidance

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has today urged companies to link its waste standard with an innovative tool that measures progress towards supporting a circular economy.

A new document provides an overview of disclosures in the GRI 306: Waste 2020 standard, and maps them against Circulytics – a tool from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that enables any business to assess circular economy performance in its operations.

It allows companies to use the data they already collect for their GRI reporting to complete a Circulytics assessment, providing results that can enhance sustainability reporting, free of charge.

“When it comes to understanding waste impacts, circularity is a central focus of the GRI waste standard,” said Anna Krotova, senior manager for standards at the GRI. “There are strong parallels between GRI 306 and the Circulytics tool.

“We would encourage organisations to assess the benefits that come from adopting circular economy practices, as supported by combining GRI reporting on waste with the metrics and insights from Circulytics.”

Launched last year, Circulytics is a comprehensive measurement tool for the circular economy, looking beyond products and material flows. A company submits responses against a set of indicator questions, leading to a scorecard on circular economy performance.

The results can inform decision making and strategy development on circular economy transition, with opportunities to share the scoring with investors and customers.

Meanwhile, GRI 306 is the first globally applicable reporting standard for companies to provide a complete picture of waste impacts along their value chain.

“We think it is important that Circulytics users can collect relevant data from the reporting they already do, to avoid added workload,” said Nikki Kapp, project manager for data and metrics at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

“Therefore, since many companies globally use the GRI standards in their non-financial reporting, we decided it was important to map the Circulytics indicators to GRI 306, and will continue to do so with other GRI standards where there is an overlap.”

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