how much of our raw materials are recycled or circular

Circular material use has no fixed VSME answer yet

There is no ready-made figure that you would standardly enter here. The VSME basic module from EFRAG does ask about waste streams — how much waste there is and what part is separately collected — but a separate data point "percentage of circular or recycled raw materials" is not included in that basic module. If a customer asks for this anyway, the question usually comes from their own sustainability questionnaire or from a sector-specific standard, not from the VSME itself.

What you can usually provide instead: the share of recycled material in procurement, if your suppliers mention that on their invoices or certificates, and the share of your own waste that is separated and returned to the supply chain. That second one directly relates to what part of the waste is separately collected — often that is the only hard figure source you already have in the file. If you have no procurement data on recycled content percentages, then "no" or "not known" is a more honest answer than an estimate.

Why this falls outside the basic module

The VSME basic module from EFRAG is built around a limited set of environmental data points: energy, emissions, waste and water. Circular material use belongs to the extended module or to supplementary, customer-specific questionnaires — not to the basic set. This means that the answer "yet to be determined" here is not a shortcoming, but an accurate representation of what is in the file. Once a customer combines this with a question about the supply chain — for example procurement of raw materials as part of scope 3 — it makes sense to look at emissions in the value chain, because procurement data on materials is sometimes already partially included there according to the GHG Protocol classification.