CIRCOMOD Contributes 26 Key Datasets to Industrial Ecology Data Commons

The Industrial Ecology Data Commons (IEDC) that is managed by our colleagues at Freiburg University, is celebrating a new milestone in its mission to provide open, accessible data for industrial ecology and socio-metabolic research. Over the last months, the platform has grown substantially in scope and usability: it now hosts more than 3.2 million individual data points, drawn from around 250 peer-reviewed publications and organized into 320 datasets .

Alongside this expansion, the IEDC now also features new datasets contributed by the CIRCOMOD project. In May 2024, the CIRCOMOD team finalized the compilation and validation of its input database, comprising more than 90 datasets archived on Zenodo. Since then, the Freiburg team has screened these datasets and selected those with the highest quality and re-use potential for integration into the IEDC.

As of today, 26 datasets (about 8% of the IEDC total) are labeled as “CIRCOMOD”. These datasets make unique contributions to the research landscape, offering data that has been scarce or unavailable until now, including:

• A comprehensive list of service lifetimes of appliances
• The material composition of land vehicles other than passenger cars
• Manufacturing yields of key materials across a wide variety of final products

In addition, around 10 datasets that were based on a single data source have also been uploaded, named after their respective sources.

This integration step ensures that CIRCOMOD’s results will remain visible, accessible, and reusable well beyond the project’s runtime — strengthening the long-term scientific and societal impact of its work.

The IEDC and CIRCOMOD teams warmly thank all data contributors and validators for their efforts in building this shared resource. Together, they are helping to build the critical mass of data needed to better understand society’s metabolism and accelerate pathways toward sustainability.

 

About IECD

The IEDC is an entirely new type of database, hosting harmonized datasets on stocks, flows, process inventories, product lifetimes, and more. Data are systematically formatted into the IEDC model, matched to established classifications, and uploaded, ensuring interoperability and comparability across studies.

The database is community-driven: researchers are encouraged to validate and submit their own datasets for inclusion. In 2025, the IEDC launched a Critical Mass Sprint for data collection, inviting the global community to contribute data and accelerate progress toward a comprehensive evidence base for socio-metabolic, industrial ecology, and circular economy research.

The IEDC team has recently launched several new search and filtering functions, giving the database a professional-grade user interface and making it easier than ever for researchers and consultants to explore the “data treasures” of the global community.