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In the extant literature, circular economy (CE) is considered a driver for sustainable development of the manufacturing sector, being it an industrial paradigm aiming at regenerating resources. CE is transferred to manufacturing companies through the adoption of different Circular Manufacturing (CM) strategies (e.g., recycling, remanufacturing, etc.). Nowadays, manufacturers are struggling to implement these strategies to limit their resource consumption and pollution generation. To enable their adoption, the extant literature unveiled the importance to control along the entire value chain different types of resource flows (i.e., material, energy, and information). Nevertheless, while for material and energy management some advancements were achieved, information management and sharing remains one of the major barriers in adopting these strategies. The present work, through a systematic literature review, aims to identify the relevant information and data required to support the manufacturer’s decision process in adopting and managing the different CM strategies to pursue the transition towards CM. Furthermore, based on the results obtained, this research proposes a theoretical framework. It elucidates the four main areas to be managed by manufacturers in adopting CM strategies and it provides to the manufacturer an overview of what should be updated and upgraded inside the company to embrace CM strategies.

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Circular economy (CE) paradigm fosters manufacturing companies’ sustainability taking place through different circular manufacturing (CM) strategies. These strategies allow companies to be internally committed to embrace circular values and to be externally aligned with several stakeholders not necessarily belonging to the same supply chain. Nevertheless, these CM strategies adoption is limited by heterogeneous barriers, among which the management and sharing of data and information remain the most relevant ones, bounding the decision-making process of manufacturers in CM. Moreover, the extant literature unveiled the need to structure data and information in a reference model to make them usable by manufacturers. Therefore, the goal of the present work is to propose a reference model by developing a conceptual data model to standardise and structure the necessary data in CM to support manufacturers’ decision-making process. Through this model, data and information to be gathered by manufacturers are elucidated, providing an overview of which ones should be managed internally, and shared externally, clarifying the presence of their mutual interdependencies. The model was conceptualised and developed relying on the extant literature and improved and validated through academic and industrial experts’ interviews.

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Nowadays, due to the limited availability of resources, the adoption of sustainable practices is gaining importance, especially while dealing with the manufacturing sector that is considered one of the most resource greedy sectors. To cope with this issue, a new sustainable and industrial economy, called "circular economy" arisen. The diffusion of this economy can be eased by the advance management of data and information. Nevertheless, from the extant literature emerged some criticalities regarding information management flows while dealing with circular economy strategies adoption. Indeed, the present work aims to first identify the main criticalities in information management while adopting circular economy principles, and second to investigate the decisions, and the related data and information required to make these decisions, that manufacturers have to undertake to enable the circular product life cycle management. To achieve this goal, the present work relies on scientific literature. This choice enables to grasp the widespread knowledge developed by scholars about these concepts, by individualizing the main decisions that should be taken by the company internal stakeholders, to manage circular products, being affected by external stakeholders' behaviours and decisions along product life cycle. Therefore, this work aims to support circular product life cycles management and, this objective has been achieved through the development of a data classification model.