Environmental Assessment

Circular Economy

Calculate circular economy metrics including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) and related metrics. Use this skill whenever the user mentions circular economy, circularity, MCI, Material Circularity Indicator, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ISO 59020, recycled input rate, recycling rate, end-of-life recycling, waste hierarchy, product lifetime, utility factor, linear flow index, ESRS E5 resource use, circular material use rate, or needs to quantify how circular a product or organization is. Also trigger when the user wants to calculate recycled content percentages, assess end-of-life scenarios, measure product lifetime extension, generate ESRS E5 disclosures, or build a circularity scorecard for a product portfolio.

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Circular Economy
Calculate circular economy metrics including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) and related metrics. Use this skill whenever the user mentions circ...

What you'll get

MCI Calculation Report
Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) score with product and company-level analysis
Excel Workbook

Based on official standards

Ellen MacArthur Foundation MCI Methodology → ISO 59020:2024 Measuring and Assessing Circularity →

How it works

1
Upload your documents
Commercial invoices, supplier data, production records — in any format or language.
2
Chat with Formist
The AI guides you through missing data, validates inputs, and clarifies methodology in real time.
3
Review structured cards
Every field is traceable back to its source document. Edit, approve, or re-upload as needed.
4
Export the final file
Download the official output (XML, XLSX, or PDF), ready to submit to the regulator.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI)?
The MCI is a methodology developed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that measures how restorative a product's material flows are on a 0 (fully linear) to 1 (fully circular) scale. It accounts for recycled input, end-of-life recycling, product lifetime, and utility. It is widely used in corporate sustainability reporting and ESRS E5.
How does ISO 59020 relate to the MCI?
ISO 59020:2024 is the first international standard for measuring and assessing circularity performance at product and organization level. It defines a set of mandatory core indicators and complementary indicators, and is compatible with the MCI approach. Many companies report both an ISO 59020 indicator set and an MCI score.
Does ESRS E5 require an MCI score?
ESRS E5 (Resource Use and Circular Economy) requires disclosure of resource inflows, resource outflows, circular material use rate, and waste. It does not prescribe the MCI specifically, but the MCI provides a defensible quantitative score that helps populate E5-1, E5-4 and E5-5 datapoints.
What data do I need to calculate an MCI?
You need the product mass and composition, the share of virgin vs recycled/reused material input, the end-of-life fate (recycled, landfilled, incinerated, reused), and the product lifetime compared to an industry average. Formist extracts these from bill of materials, EPDs and end-of-life studies.
What is the Circular Material Use Rate?
The Circular Material Use Rate (CMU) is a macro indicator used in EU policy and ESRS E5 that measures the share of recycled materials in total material use. Formula: (recycled material used) / (total material used). It is different from MCI, which is a product-level indicator, but both can be reported together.
Can MCI results be compared across products?
MCI scores are most useful within the same product category, where assumptions about lifetime, utility and material recoverability are comparable. Direct comparison across very different products (e.g. a T-shirt vs a steel beam) requires careful contextualization. The MCI methodology emphasizes hotspot analysis over ranking.

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