ZEOS RAVNANJE Z ELEKTRICNO IN ELEKTRONSKO OPREMO DOO

Their core work

ZEOS is Slovenia's national producer responsibility organization (PRO) for waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), operating the country's collective take-back and recycling compliance system. In practical terms, they manage the flow of end-of-life electronics from households and businesses through certified collection points and licensed recyclers, acting as the operational backbone of Slovenia's e-waste system under the EU WEEE Directive. In H2020 projects they participate as third-party implementers and data contributors — bringing real-world e-waste logistics data and operational infrastructure to research consortia rather than conducting fundamental research themselves. Their value to science projects is the direct access to live material flows, compliance records, and industry contacts across the electronics take-back chain.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first H2020 engagement (ProSUM, 2015–2017), ZEOS contributed to physical material recovery — urban mining, secondary raw materials, and the question of what valuable resources can be extracted from end-of-life electronics. By their second project (CircThread, 2021–2025), the focus had shifted entirely toward the digital layer: product catalogues, data contracting, and industrial data commons as enablers of circular resource management. This trajectory mirrors the broader EU policy shift from treating circularity as a logistics problem toward treating it as a data and governance problem, and ZEOS appears to be following — and helping shape — that shift from the operator side.

ZEOS is moving from physical e-waste operations toward digital circular economy frameworks, making them a relevant partner for any project needing a real-world WEEE operator willing to test data-sharing and product lifecycle traceability systems.

How they like to work

ZEOS consistently enters projects as a third party rather than as a formal coordinator or research partner — a pattern that reflects their role as an operational contributor rather than a research driver. They bring live infrastructure and compliance data to consortia rather than leading work packages. Despite this limited formal role, their network is broad: 78 unique partners across 25 countries from only two projects indicates membership in large, pan-European consortia where they serve as one of several national implementation actors.

ZEOS has reached 78 unique consortium partners across 25 countries through just two large-scale projects, pointing to involvement in expansive European consortia typical of Horizon 2020 Innovation Actions and Coordination and Support Actions in the circular economy space. Their network is pan-European by necessity, reflecting the cross-border nature of WEEE compliance and secondary material flows.

What sets them apart

ZEOS occupies a rare niche as a national WEEE compliance operator that actively engages in EU research projects, bridging the gap between regulatory compliance systems and innovation consortia. Few producer responsibility organizations in Europe take this step, making ZEOS one of the few places where a researcher or consortium can access real, live e-waste operational data alongside regulatory and logistics expertise in one partner. For any project that needs to validate circular economy concepts against actual material flows — not modelled data — ZEOS offers direct grounding in Slovenian and by extension Central European WEEE reality.

Highlights from their portfolio

• CircThread
  A 2021–2025 Innovation Action building a Digital Thread for circular product management — one of the most technically ambitious circular economy data infrastructure projects in H2020, where ZEOS contributes as an operational testbed from the WEEE compliance sector.
• ProSUM
  An early urban mining project (2015–2017) that positioned ZEOS at the intersection of secondary raw materials policy and e-waste logistics at a time when the EU Critical Raw Materials agenda was just forming.