Waste and traceability - new project 

In today's society, we need to improve the management of waste to promote a circular economy and ensure the protection of human health and the environment. An important part of this is to ensure traceability and reliability along the entire value chain, from the raw materials industry to the waste sector - and back again. A multi-stakeholder project is now being planned to explore ways and solutions to foster the circular economy by increasing the transparency of national waste streams and tackling crime in the waste sector.

There is a lack of data on waste and waste management and a strong need for traceability and information sharing along long value chains to enable a more resource-efficient economy with circular material and product flows. This challenge requires cooperation between actors. Joining forces increases the possibilities to also ensure that future digital product passports are linked to waste information. 

Digital product passports will soon be a requirement for all products on the European market, the waste sector as part of the circular value chain will need to consider how traceability requirements will affect the industry. Digitalization is a prerequisite for effective traceability and stakeholders have everything to gain from being involved in developing industry-wide solutions.  

Stakeholder constellation

The origin of the project is a discussion between the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and partners from the Trust4Value project, traceability for sustainable value chains, which is funded by Vinnova. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency is coordinating the national assignment on inter-agency work against waste crime that the government has given a number of authorities.

But to address the challenges of the project, a broad consortium is needed and we therefore welcome actors in systems development and data analysis, but also in the building materials industry, the rock materials industry, the recycling industry, the mining sector, the chemical/refinery and the construction industry, among others.

The project foresees a range of activities such as

  • Develop methods and tools (e.g. AI models) that can contribute to traceability and analysis solutions that can work in practice for both operators and supervisory authorities.
  • Clarify the national material/waste streams by visualizing the collected data sets.
  • Establish a broad collaboration between key stakeholders such as national authorities, regulators and industry.

Behind the initiative is the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency together with RISE and the strategic innovation program PiiA, Process Industrial IT & Automation.  

For more information, please contact Kenneth Pettersson, Swedish EPA or Anne Faxér, RISE.