Circularise offers a blockchain-based transparency solution to provide absolute proof for the circular economy, sustainability and recycling practices of manufacturers at any stage of the supply chain. Circularise enables value chain transparency without disclosure of datasets or supply chain partners. The portal uses decentralized, encrypted data to track material characteristics of products which are not distinguishable by disassembling the product, e.g. whether, and which proportion recycled materials have been employed. The system uses a virtual currency and chemical tracer to make supply chain transparency fraud-proof and certify materials. Different from paper-based information sharing which, in 65% of the cases, doesn't even go past tier 1 suppliers, the system does not require the entire supply chain to be known, cooperating, or certified. The technology decreases auditing and production costs due to a smaller number of audited parties. Validatable claims are traded directly from the material manufacturer to the brand owner no matter how far along the supply chain the manufacturer is. The resulting affordable recycled material will increase the market share of sustainable products and make them attainable for average customers. The possibility to increase revenue through circular economy business models makes it an intrinsically motivated development. The possibility to increase revenue through circular economy business models revolutionizes the sector turning it from a necessity due to external expectations to an intrinsically motivated development. The proof provided by Circularise allows monetization of the sustainability practices and creates an intrinsic motivation for circularity in our economy.

As EU environmental regulation tightens, many European electronics firms have prioritised sustainable manufacturing not just in their own products and processes, but increasingly for standard parts and components sourced from developing countries. Sourcing sustainable electronics from these nations, while hugely economically attractive, can be challenging. Small and medium-sized enterprises(SME’s) typically encounter constraints to accessing knowledge and information if they are distanced from an OEM or final manufacturer, and are unlikely to gain valuable sustainable manufacturing knowledge they can apply. In addition, many SME's producing standard electronics products, either lack incentive to move away from a ‘cost-effective products approach’, or simply do not possess the skills, resources or mindset to produce environmentally sustainable products. TranSMKnow seeks to address this by developing and exploiting a novel ground-up approach to incentivising distant suppliers in Vietnam's growing electronics sector, to learn and adopt ‘sustainable’ practices via informal 'downstream' knowledge transfer. To achieve this, TranSMKnow develops and facilitates a holistic approach including 'learning by doing' sustainable design and manufacturing practices relating to products and/or production processes, but also building mindset change. We focus our training around a few typical electronics parts, destined for the EU, with the idea that the worker can initially build skills around these products, and then apply their new knowledge, and develop confidence to transfer this training to other products that use similar machinery and technology. This project utilises AI to chart both the supply path and the environmental 'profile' of these typical products (i.e. repeated quality, repair and recyclability issues) identified downstream, to develop a package of tailored sustainable learning processes and tools. TranSMKnow training will be validated in a few Vietnamese SME's.

Polymers are one of the most used materials in different applications, especially in consumer goods like electronics, and the consumption is only expected to rise globally. In Europe, 25,8 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated annually and less than 30 % is collected for recycling and significant shares are exported from EU to be treated elsewhere. Landfilling (31 %) and incineration (39 %) of plastics is high (together 70 %), and by these treatment options the valuable materials are lost from circulation. It is estimated that 95 % of the value of plastic packaging material, between 70-105 billion EUR, is lost annually to the economy after a very short first-use cycle. The industry is lacking standards and main barriers for efficient uptake of recyclates are due to safety concerns, low quality, and recycling rates. PRIMUS activities will increase the resilience of EU's plastic value chains by securing supply of waste plastics as feedstock and increasing its availability through connecting value chain actors, developing methods to control quality, sampling, and analysis, and improving upgrading knowhow and characterize suitability towards added-value products. PRIMUS will prove legislative compliant, privacy-preserving, cost-efficient and feasible technological pathways for tapping into non-recycled or underutilized plastic waste streams. Validated business cases will lower the risks of future investments into European manufacturing capacity. PRIMUS will address one of the core challenges identified in the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, the presence of hazardous substances (brominated flame retardants) and how to effectively and safely debrominate the waste streams for new product use. PRIMUS will contribute to circulating underutilised or non-recycled streams and create further impact by supporting additional production of 0,2 Mtonnes of rHIPS, rPC/ABS, rEPDM and rTPE, which is approximately 6 % of the expected growth of European recyclate market 2018-2024.

Circular economy aims at reducing value loss and avoiding waste, by circulating materials or product parts before they become waste. Today, lack of support for sharing data in a secure, quality assured, and automated way is one of the main obstacles that industry actors point to when creating new circular value networks. Together with using different terminologies and not having explicit definitions of the concepts that appear in data, this makes it very difficult to create new ecosystems of actors in Europe today. This project will address the core challenges of making decentralized data and information understandable and usable for humans as well as machines. The project will leverage open standards for semantic data interoperability in establishing a shared vocabulary (ontology network) for data documentation, as well as a decentralized digital platform that enables collaboration in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The project addresses a number of open research problems, including the development of ontologies that need to model a wide range of different materials and products, not only providing vertical interoperability but also horizontal interoperability, for cross-industry value networks. As well as transdisciplinary research on methods to find, analyse and assess new circular value chain configurations opened up by considering resource, information, value and energy flows as an integral part of the same complex system. Three industry use cases, from radically different industry domains, act as drivers for the research and development activities, as well as test beds and demonstrators for the cross-industry applicability of the results. The developed solutions will allow for automation of planning, management, and execution of circular value networks, at a European scale, and beyond. The project thereby supports acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and formation of new collaborations in the circular economy.

The COMPASS project is driven by the needs to on the one hand increase the efficiency of recycling and remanufacturing processes (for sheet metal parts) and on the other hand by the need to find a solution for large quantities of thermoplastic fibre-reinforced components at their end of life. In both cases the proposed approach is to take a shortcut by remanufacturing the components at the level of sheet metal and composite panels instead of converting them to secondary raw material. This will be achieved through (thermo-)forming processes that allow the re-shaping of parts and components to give them a second and third life. These remanufacturing processes will be supported by a set of digital tools that build upon a digital component passport. The tools will enable efficient dismantling processes to extract sheets or panels e.g. from an aircraft and will help to collect relevant information about the components during their lifetime. The main use cases are from the aerospace and automotive sector and include key actors along the value chain. By using digital information about defects, re-work or repair done during the lifetime of the components. The quality of the resulting, remanufactured output parts will be optimized. A remanufacturing process planning software will also optimize the match between input components and targeted output parts. The COMPASS project will initiate more than 6M€ of private investments in technology development and implementation of remanufacturing process in the use cases investigated in the project. The overall goal is to enable the remanufacturing of about 30% of sheet metal parts and thermoplastic composite panels.