Pairing a circular economy and the 5G-enabled Internet of Things: creating a class of "Looping Smart Assets"Pairing a circular economy and the 5G-enabled Internet of Things: creating a class of "Looping Smart Assets" Peer-Reviewed Journal Publication Δημοσίευση σε Περιοδικό με Κριτές 2021-05-262020enThe 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.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine15320-31Miaoudakis_et_al_IEEE Veh. Technol. Mag._15(3)_2020.pdfChania [Greece]Library of TUC2021-05-25application/pdf2.8 MBfree Miaoudakis Andreas Fysarakis Konstantinos Φυσαρακης Κωνσταντινος Petroulakis Nikolaos Alexaki Sofia Alexandris George Ioannidis Sotirios Sotirios Spanoudakis, George Katos Vasileios Verikoukis, Christos Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Internet of Things (IoT) Ecosystems Supply chains Interoperability Vehicles 5G mobile communication