POLYPROBLEM report: The Circularity Code

56 PREVENT Waste Alliance (2023) (2), p. 5 MONITORING BY APP DIGITAL SOLUTIONS CREATE TRANSPARENCY AND TRUST The use of digital solutions can create a higher level of transparency, which is becoming progressively more important for brands given their increasingly scrutinized supply chains and the growing interest in using socially responsible recycled plastics. The same applies to demonstrating compliance with statutory EPR obligations in terms of collection, recycling, and reuse rates. The associated rise in the value of waste goes hand in hand with a need for certification in order to avoid fraud at various levels and build trust in the long term. This in turn creates a need for monitoring, reporting, and verification standards for the collection and recycling of waste. “Standards have little value if they are not adhered to. At the same time, continuous documentation is time-consuming and costs money, something the waste and recycling sector lacks in many places,” Joel Tasche critically notes. The co-founder and CEO of the CleanHub platform knows what he’s talking about, as his Berlin-based start-up helps brands and consumers to offset their plastic footprint. CleanHub works with local collection and recycling partners in India, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Tanzania. By using specially developed software, the start-up not only aims to make documentation easier, but also to ensure that the ongoing recording of the mass balances of waste streams along the entire logistics chain is comprehensible and accurate. For this, photos of relevant data and weight records spanning the entire process of collecting plastic waste from the environment to its sorting and further transport are uploaded to the CleanHub app by all those involved. A real-time feed displays the data that enters the Cleanhub system. It can then be viewed on a realtime dashboard on the start-up’s website. This creates the necessary transparency and trust among CleanHub customers, who in turn have digital proof of how much plastic was collected from the environment, when and where, and how it was processed or disposed of properly. “What matters is to put the collected data, in our case pixel values, into context in such a way that it can be compared with data from various previous points in time to ensure it is correct. Machine learning or algorithms will play an even more important role in this in the future because they are able to recognize deviations independently,” Tasche explains. This will make it possible to detect errors and avoid fraud, for example by making it more difficult to book waste twice even though it has only been collected once. When it comes to social aspects, such as ensuring occupational health and safety or fair pay, Tasche also warns that technology won’t do the trick all by itself. Compliance requires physical social audits directly on site. So it seems that we can’t run everything in the digital space, and perhaps we shouldn’t. Benefits of understanding On the other hand, not every business welcomes the greater transparency afforded by digital data collection and its overarching benefits in fighting the plastic waste crisis. Skeptics fear the additional bureaucracy and expenses due to more red tape but this makes it all the more important to consider the perspectives of waste 40

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