Material Tracking: A Powerful Ally of Circular Design
Introduction
As I sit at my favourite café in the heart of a bustling city, sipping a latte from a disposable cup, I check my smartphone, a marvel of modern technology that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. I find myself contemplating the journey of the chair I’m sitting on and the cup I drink from. I wonder about the path these materials have taken to arrive here and what lies ahead for them once their usefulness has been exhausted.
This chair, for instance, has likely been a part of this café for years, witnessing countless conversations and personal moments. It originated in a factory, where raw materials are transformed into furniture and transported to this café, where it has served as a seat for hundreds of customers.
My disposable cup, on the other hand, is relatively new; it might be only a month old, but it too has a story. It began as simple paper, derived from trees and other sources, and was then manufactured, filled with my latte, and handed to me. Now it holds my drink for a brief moment before its destiny to the waste bin.
I realize, rather quickly, that the coffee I enjoy and the device I hold are part of an even more complicated story— of extraction, transformation, consumption, and often, wasteful disposal.
As we go about our daily lives, surrounded by the conveniences of the modern world, have you ever paused to wonder about the journey of the things we use? Imagine if these objects could talk and recount their adventures before reaching our hands. What if that disposable cup could share its travel from a distant forest to the café, or that smartphone could narrate its evolution from raw minerals deep within the Earth?
We believe storytelling presents a way for us to better understand and manage our world of finite resources—and here we explore material tracking as a tool for the paradigm shift to a circular economy.
Unveiling Material Tracking
Much like a detective skillfully piecing together clues, material tracking unfolds the past lives of materials, tracing their origins from mines, fields, or factories. It’s akin to keeping a watchful eye on these materials as they change into products, navigate distribution networks, and eventually become integral parts of our lives.
Tracking is already prevalent in food supply chains, ensuring traceability, maintaining quality, and minimizing waste. Now, we find ourselves in a compelling position as well to follow the breadcrumbs left by our materials. As waste management technologies become increasingly dependent on the minutiae of material composition, tracking becomes our compass, alerting us to potential hiccups in the process.
In a world where complex supply chains intertwine, material tracking allows companies (and consumers) to trace the origins of their products for compliance, efficiency, and sustainability purposes. Material traceability empowers inventory management, plan production, and supply chain optimization, and in the later stages, tracking waste recyclability. Essentially, material tracking equips businesses to make informed decisions grounded in a wealth of data.
5 Steps to Material Tracking for Circular Businesses and Designers
1. Clearly define your objectives and metrics:
Begin by envisioning your design process as a cycle rather than a linear path and define your circular economy objectives: whether it’s reducing waste, extending product lifecycles, or creating materials that can be easily repurposed.
Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the success of your tracking efforts. This may include tracking the percentage of materials recycled or reused post-use, carbon footprint calculation, or supply chain transparency.
2. Select the appropriate tracking technologies for your business:
Businesses may track materials primarily for cost and availability, or they may decide to trace materials back to their sources, verifying organic certifications and ethical practices.
Thus, a variety of tools like blockchain, IoT sensors, RFID tags, and data analytics should be considered, depending on your tracking goals. Think creatively about how tracking elements can become design features, telling the story of your materials and their journey.
3. Integrate tracking into your supply chain:
Collaborate with suppliers, partners, and logistics providers to see that tracking technologies are uniformly implemented and to ensure that tracking data is collected from the extraction or production phase throughout the distribution, use, and end-of-life stages.
4. Data Collection and Analysis:
Use data analytics and AI to process the collected information and identify opportunities for material reuse, recycling, or refurbishment. Analyze patterns and trends to make informed decisions about resource optimization.
5. Continuous Improvement and Transparency:
Treat material tracking as an ongoing narrative. Continuously gather data about the lifecycle of your designs and use it to refine your supply chain. Maintain transparency by sharing tracking data with stakeholders, including customers who value sustainability. Consider providing product QR codes or labels with access to the tracking information. Continuously update and adapt your material tracking strategies to align with evolving circularity goals and market demands.
By following these steps, businesses and designers can leverage material tracking to enhance their circular efforts and gain a competitive edge in the market, because investing in material tracking not only benefits the environment but also augments brand reputation and customer loyalty.
Material Tracking Innovations
In our current industry landscape, a multitude of emerging technologies are dedicated to addressing material tracking within the ideals of the circular economy:
1. Circular Information Systems
Circularity.ID® is a digital information carrier designed to store the product’s narrative, along with vital data, seamlessly integrating it into an organization’s circularity system. This technology serves supply chain transparency while furnishing data to enable recycling, resale, and rental options at the end of the product’s lifecycle.
Dutch aWEARness is designing a Circular Resource Management System ****(CRMS) involving all supply chain partners by identifying raw materials and products via barcodes for tracking throughout the development process and for reuse. It also incorporates Life Cycle Analysis, purchasing and inventory management, and Track & Trace tools. The various types of information are kept among multiple modules, each linked to the overall CRMS architecture.
2. Reused Material Marketplaces
Reused Material Marketplaces (RMM) bring all end-of-life materials together in one location, allowing us to track leftover materials for a new lifecycle.
An example is Superuse Studios, a Dutch architecture company with a unique approach. They methodically track the flow of materials in construction projects and find creative new uses for what might otherwise become waste. They have also created a website that maps and catalogues these reusable material waste streams, contributing to the birth of new, sustainable products.
3. Building Information Modelling (BIM)
Building Information Modelling (BIM) programs analyze and generate data that spans the entire lifecycle of a building, from cost calculations to creating visual designs. The goal here is to turn our buildings into caches of reusable components and notable examples of such software include Autodesk Revit.
4. Material Passports
By providing data on what materials a product is composed of, how long the materials take to degrade, and what remains at the end of life, Material Passports make it easier for designers and manufacturers to choose better material alternatives while also enabling reverse logistics and reclaimed products. Material passports can formulate recovery and reuse strategies, manage waste, cut costs, and support further assessments like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), reversible design protocols, etc.
Circlolink’s RFiD THREADS® is a Digital Product Passport (DPP) housed within a single washable thread bridging the gap between businesses and consumers. As fine as a 10cm thread, these radio frequency digital IDs can seamlessly integrate into new and existing products and stay with the product throughout its journey They connect to the SaaS CIRCAA app cloud platform to ensure that your products are part of the circular economy revolution. When you scan an RFiD THREADS®-enabled product (with any inexpensive commercial RFID reader), you unlock access to a vast network of resource recovery providers who can help brands increase their ROI by reselling, repairing, renting, redesigning, reusing, and remaking products, all while enriching the product’s lifecycle data.
The ‘Buildings as Material Banks (BAMB)‘ project provides material passports for building materials, which facilitates reversible Building Design initiatives and makes it easier for architects and developers to choose sustainable and circular building materials for their construction projects.
Conclusion
So, as I sit in the café, I can’t help but reflect on the significance of this moment, the interconnectedness of the materials, and the potential for change in the way we approach products and materials in our modern, consumer-driven world. It’s a thought-provoking journey into the world of sustainable living and a reminder that the choices we make can play a role in shaping our planet.
To make this journey more visible, tangible and relatable, material tracking must be incorporated into every supply chain. In this article, we have introduced the concept and purpose of material tracking, presented a five-step framework for circular businesses and designers to implement it, and showcased some of the innovative solutions and initiatives emerging in this field.
However, material tracking is not easy. It requires the collaboration and coordination of multiple actors along the supply chain, the adoption of common standards and protocols, and the integration of different technologies. It also needs to respect the data and safety of everyone involved. Also, material tracking alone is not sufficient to achieve a circular economy; it must be complemented by other policies and measures that address the systemic barriers of the current linear model.
Nonetheless, we hope this article has inspired you to explore the potential of material tracking for your own products and services and to join us in the mission to make our materials more circular.
What steps will you take to track your materials and tell their stories?
