Hyper-local Circular Economy Platform: A Trusted, Community-centric Digital System for Sharing, Renting and Reuse

This paper proposes a hyper-local digital platform that enables verified community members (housing societies, family groups, college hostels) to lend, borrow, rent, and share goods within a closed ecosystem. Unlike open public marketplaces, the platform emphasizes trust (community verification + trust score), AI-driven item categorization and price prediction, and low-latency messaging (Redis pub/sub with archival in PostgreSQL). Building on taxonomies and archetypes of circular-economy (CE) platforms, systematic literature on digital platforms for CE, and studies on the sharing economy, we design architecture and an evaluation plan to measure adoption, trust, prediction accuracy, and environmental impact. We show how a hybrid PostgreSQL + Redis architecture supports both ACID transactional data and real-time interactions, while a modular Python ML microservice provides category and price predictions. Expected outcomes include improved resource circulation within communities, higher trust and lower transaction friction than public marketplaces, and measurable lifecycle benefits.