Dagmar Glatz would like to have digital product passports for her entire product range starting today rather than tomorrow. However, she believes it is only a matter of time before things will really take off. The stricter regulations alone make her hopeful. “Obligations to provide information on recyclability and recyclable product design are already extensive and will continue to increase. This will create an enormous amount of work for every company along the entire value chain, which you can only reduce through standardized and automated digital solutions,” dm’s sustainability manager believes. It is crucial to find a common language, a protocol with which the data can be evaluated in a standardized manner and which will ultimately lead to a uniform and easy evaluation of the recycling options after a product’s use phase. Heino Claussen-Markefka cites the example of a shower gel container. It consists of a cap, the bottle itself, and the label. Eight different players are involved in the production and handling of these three components right through to filling – all pursuing different technical interests and speaking different corporate languages. R-Cycle has therefore envisioned an open solution from the outset, based on existing standards set by the world’s leading standardizer, GS1, such as the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN). A host of production companies and users should ensure that developments get as widely tested as possible. While R-Cycle focuses on an open standard and wants to establish a new cooperation model in addition to a digital solution, other providers are focused on the integration of additional tasks and their solutions. For example, recyda, a young company based in Freiburg, Germany, focuses its solution on evaluating recyclability by taking various standards into account. recyda also makes it possible to bring together and evaluate all relevant data relating to the properties of a product’s packaging, its recyclability, and its recyclate content on one platform. The software also allows users to evaluate the packaging’s compliance with laws and regulations on extended producer responsibility (EPR) applicable in various countries, including calculating country-specific taxes and duties. Used proactively, digital technology can help design packaging with an optimized ecological and economic footprint. The Dutch company circularise has positioned itself in a similar way. It claims to offer a package deal including both reporting and mass balance accounting together with a digital product passport. With its Responsible Design and Production platform, software giant SAP is also pursuing an integrated approach. In this case, the focus is not on the digital product passport, but on compliance with legal packaging requirements, in particular automated EPR reporting and plastic packaging taxes. “Our solution brings together all relevant data from a company’s entire packaging portfolio, links packaging data with logistics data, and can then use this standardized data model to generate various country-specific reports tailored to regulatory requirements,” explains Katharina Schweitzer, consultant for circular economy solutions at SAP. In a first step, the Walldorf-based company wants to help its customers meet increasingly strict and complex transparency and reporting obligations. In a second step, it wants to use the knowledge gained about a customer’s packaging portfolio to start optimizing products in the design process. While SAP primarily targets international companies, it also relies on the fact that many large enterprises already work with SAP which means the data is already available, for example, from purchasing. 8
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