Part 2: Measuring indicators

Goal: Measure and check the 21 indicators.

Situation: The circularity assessment is supported by indicators, which use the output of the accounting and are calculated to reflect the status of progress towards a circular economy in the city. The focus lies on Vision Element 3 “Closing material loops and reducing harmful resource use” of the Circular City definition. The indicators that best fit to the object of study and scale, measuring circularity at the city scale, have been selected and adapted according to the existing literature: several EW-MFA indicators, some of those proposed by Mayer et al. (Mayer et al. 2019) as well as two indicators that (Barles 2009) designed to correct for the city level, DMCcorr and LEPO and one additional one for material stock are included, as shown in the table. (In addition to the 18 indicators in the table, three additional balancing indicators exist.)

Approach

Part 2 is all about measuring and checking the indicators. You will do the interpretation of them in Part 3.

  1. Link the data sheets: So far you have worked in the Data collection and processing sheets. Now it’s time to link them to the UCA - Data analysis template. Be sure to have two copies of the Data analysis sheets, one for each reference year and to link them to the processed data of the respective year. Again, we recommend linking data within different sheets through the IMPORTRANGE function of google sheets. For this, go to “Data Analysis” sheet > Tab “rawData_ewMFA_input_side” and add the IMPORTRANGE function to get the data from your other sheets.
  2. Check the indicators: Go to the tab “All results” and you will find your 21 indicators in an orange frame. You should make a Sanity check of the 21 values. For example, a #DIV/0! or #REF! error is already a useful indication that something is wrong and needs to be investigated. Negative values should also be investigated to find out how those are produced. (Do this check for your two reference years.)
  3. Gather and compare indicator values for two years: To be able to better compare the indicators between two years (and to later on add this table to your UCA Report), you can add the indicator values (with the IMPORTRANGE function of google sheets) for two years into a new table (see template). The percentage change between the years is calculated automatically.