The increase in the world's population has led to a massive rise in human consumption of the planet's natural resources, well beyond their replacement rate. Traditional recycling concepts and methods are not enough to counter such effects. In this context, a circular economy (CE), that is, a restorative and regenerative by-design economy, can reform today's "take-make-dispose" economic model. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gradually transform our everyday lives, allowing for the introduction of novel types of services while enhancing legacy ones. Taking this as our motivation, in this article we analyze the CE/IoT interplay, indicating innovative ways in which this interaction can drastically affect products and services, their underlying business models, and the associated ecosystems. Moreover, we present an IoT architecture that enables smart object integration into the IoT ecosystem. The presented architecture integrates circularityenabling features by maximizing the exploitation of assets toward a new type of IoT ecosystem that is circular by design (CbD). Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation and an application study of the proposed architecture and results regarding the applicability of the proposed approach for the telecommunications (telecom) sector.

中文翻译：

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将循环经济与 5G 物联网结合起来：创建一类“循环智能资产”


世界人口的增长导致人类对地球自然资源的消耗大幅增加，远远超出了其替代率。传统的回收概念和方法不足以应对这种影响。在此背景下，循环经济（CE），即一种恢复性和再生性的设计经济，可以改革当今“获取-制造-处置”的经济模式。另一方面，物联网 (IoT) 继续逐渐改变我们的日常生活，允许引入新型服务，同时增强传统服务。以此为动机，在本文中，我们分析了 CE/IoT 相互作用，指出这种相互作用可以极大影响产品和服务、其底层商业模式以及相关生态系统的创新方式。此外，我们还提出了一种物联网架构，可以将智能对象集成到物联网生态系统中。所提出的架构通过最大限度地利用资产来集成循环支持功能，以实现新型设计循环的物联网生态系统（CbD）。最后，我们提供了所提出的架构的概念验证实施和应用研究以及有关所提出的方法在电信（电信）领域的适用性的结果。