The CirculariseSource project certifies recycled material content, material quality characteristics and product passport data and provides a business model to companies that adjust their production or supply chain towards more sustainability.
Interest in products with transparent supply chains is rising among customers and sector leaders announce ambitious sustainability goals and pledges. Manufacturers of packaging and hard plastics are increasingly confronted with customer’s claims for recycled content. Their customers, e.g. big automotive companies have claimed to switch to high percentages of recycled materials by 2025, without a clear plan on how to do so or even certify the recycling content. 65% of procurement leaders even admit that they have only partial or no visibility beyond their tier 1 suppliers. However, the success and reputation of their brands depend on these proofs and supply chain transparency has become a crucial demand by customers which is increasingly added to the political agenda, especially in the context of circular economy, product safety, labour conditions and conflict-free sourcing in the material sourcing and production. Sustainable material manufacturers must prove that their products are sustainable. Doing so is expensive, and the process is susceptible to fraud. These barriers make manufacturers less competitive in the market, compared to their competitors without transparency claims.
Circularise Source digitises, scales and eases this process while allowing the plastics sector to continue working with the recognized certification institutions and auditors which it has been trusting for the past 30 years. At the same time CirculariseSource creates a totally new market for manufacturers that want to provide transparency, as they are now able to certify their products without requiring certified intermediaries or the cooperation of any other stakeholder in their supply chain. This decentralised, trustless system creates a competitive and dynamic market of sustainably producing manufacturers that can be contracted independently. The new level of independence encourages sustainable behaviour and makes them immediately eligible for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) looking for sustainable material. This combination between trusted standards and a disruptive decentralised and competitive system provides a smooth transition. Scaling the technology and allowing its broad and consistent implementation is therefore crucial in order to reach sustainability and transparency across all sectors.
The objective of CirculariseSource is to boost a resource-efficient circular economy by unlocking additional revenue for material recyclers due to validatable certification of products based and enhanced supply chain transparency. The project makes recycling more profitable for recyclers, manufacturers and retailers and aims at contributing to an increase in market-share of recycled plastics.
Within the project the certification technology, Circularise Source, which had been tested in real production processes with the market leaders Domo Chemicals and Covestro before the project, has been scaled from TRL6 to TRL9.Thisl allowed not only the implementation of the technology within all product segments of existing customers, but the integration with the entire plastic supply chain of further new plastics companies like Lyondellbasel and Neste as doorstep to interdisciplinary application of plastics. This succeeded e.g. with customers like Samsonite and Philipps.
