Produktion2030 CEPort
Material Passport: A digital platform for manufacturing industry to implement Circular Production Systems.
Background
Transition towards circular economy (CE) through implementing Circular Production Systems (CPS) has become inevitable to mitigate challenges of resource scarcity and resource price volatility as well as ensure sustainable development. Furthermore, there is a huge economic potential for the industry to be tapped through high quality value recovery in the form of products or materials by implementing CPS. However, one of the challenges with implementation of CPS is to ensure integration and flow of information across the value chains so that right value recovery activities can be performed efficiently to recover value.
Traditionally, information management systems in industry are not designed for value recovery and there is always a risk for breach in information sharing across the value chains and trade-levels. Although the manufacturing industry is known to be highly efficient in product data management, the data management systems have seldom been designed to facilitate the circular flow of products or materials. Therefore, the project aims to lay a foundation to develop a digital platform that can enable generating material passports3 to facilitate implementation of CPS. The platform will establish connection between different value chain actors and enable them to share product and material information throughout multiple lifecycle4 of products. Such a platform can also provide support for product compliance, increase transparency across value chains, sustainable sourcing and efficient recovery of materials etc.
Project description
The project will assess the applicability of the concept of ‘material passport’ in the manufacturing industry by involving a cross functional group represented by researchers, manufacturers, software developers and recycling experts.
