According to Accenture, a Circular Economy could generate $4.5 trillion of additional economic output by 2030. The timeline happens to coincide with the United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030 of creating a world without poverty, a healthy planet, and a better society for everyone through17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Although the Circular Economy revolves around SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, all 17 goals are very much interconnected and will benefit greatly by the circular transition, especially SDG 2: Zero Hunger, SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG 13: Climate Action, SDG 14: Life Below Water, and SDG 15: Life on Land.

• Supply chain transparency and traceability: In order to use recycled materials repeatedly, it is important to have unprecedented insights into the end-to-end supply chain. Geospatial technology offers interactive visualization of big datasets from raw material to distribution, including extended supply chain discovery, risk analysis, transaction history, and others.
• Reducing waste: Recycling is key to reducing waste. In order to create an efficient recycling system, waste has to first be visible, verifiable and valuable. Geospatial technology, complemented by AI and ML, can offer insights into material types, amounts, concentrations, and movements of waste that will benefit waste producers, recyclers, investors and governments.
• Extending product lifetime: As consumer preference now shifts towards pay-per-use instead of ownership-based, businesses need to maintain products for longer and offer new services to keep their competitive advantage. Taking example of pay-per-use car service, technologies such as GPS Telematics and IoT are imperative in providing predictive maintenance, fuel efficiency support, driving behavior report, etc. within this emerging business model.
• Recycling/Buyback campaign: In order to minimize environmental impacts in ways that will generate customer loyalty, businesses can use GIS and geo-targeting technology to map their customers in certain area and initiate either a buyback campaign or recycling drop-off campaign at specific phases of product ownership cycle. The rebought/dropped-off products can be fed back into the production cycle as raw material for a new generation of products.
• Maximizing the use of underused assets: Sharing economy platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, and Neighbor have demonstrated the best solutions to underused assets. Location data is critical to these platforms in order to match the nearest suppliers to consumers.