The role of Digital Twins in electronic devices lifecycle: unlocking potential for Circular Economy practices

Recently, both academic and scientific debates have been strongly focused on the issue of electronic waste, given the significant environmental and economic challenges associated with it, encouraging therefore circular economy (CE) practices at their end-of-life management. Smart waste management has emerged thanks to the rapid development of digital technologies. Among these, thanks to their capabilities, Digital Twins (DTs) have recently emerged as promising for advancing CE initiatives; however, their functionalities in the electronics sector in supporting CE practices have not been analysed to a great extent. This article aims to provide a comprehensive view on current functionalities of DTs across electronic devices lifecycle, assessing how and for which purpose they are applied, highlighting challenges to CE. The article presents a systematic literature review which focuses on DT functionalities such as level of application (i.e., component, product, process levels), lifecycle phases supported, and the types of data collected in current DT applications. The main findings reveal that most of current DT implementations overlook CE aspects, mainly due to the limited data reuse across lifecycles. Building on these results, the paper proposes a conceptual scheme of guidelines that systemically incorporates DTs into CE workflows, optimizing their use for enhanced circularity throughout electronic devices lifecycle at different levels of application. The developed analysis aims at presenting how to advance DTs as enablers of circularity and provides practical insights for electronics value chain actors in transitioning toward circular practices, by leveraging the potentials of DTs.