Traceable materials and products in the circular economy

Sustainability, resilience, circular economy and the understanding of limited resources place ever increasing demands, while digitization gives new expectations for stakeholders to share information along material value chains. Material information traceability can be used, for example, for the development of materials and products, material management systems, business models with different sharing and responsibility roles, effective recycling solutions, effective tracking of failure causes and assurance of sustainable supply chains. Traceability solutions underpin:

• Fundamental transformation of the organization's information management for digitization and controlled data sharing.
• Requirement that promises of sustainable responsibility in resource extraction can be conveyed and verified when making claims to customers and when setting requirements on suppliers.
• The resilient society's need to secure both the resource assets that exist in society as well as what alternative sources for resource that are available.
• The circular economy's need for information exchange for collaboration across complex value networks to realize circular opportunities in materials, products, technologies and business models.
• To implement and maximize the benefit of the EU's Digital Product Passport.

RISE brings strong competence within a broad spectrum that makes us a one-stop-shop for understanding and designing solutions for your needs. We can contribute to shaping strategic development lines within the circular economy for services, products and materials where for example material identification, digitization and standardization are needed to develop and realize traceability solutions. RISE can support businesses and society with traceability solutions and knowledge in the following three roles:

1. Innovation partner for large or small companies and organizations to solve strategic and practical issues around product and material traceability.
2. Service provider to investigate technical aspects of traceability needs for companies, from a material, digitized and/or organizational point of view.
3. Research partner, in all areas relating to traceability.