Delft Circularity Lab lunch seminar - 19 September

Digital infrastructures for circular economy and sustainability monitoring

Joint presentation: Boriana Rukanova, Jolien Ubacht, Yao-Hua Tan in collaboration with Selinde van Engelenberg, Siu Lie Tan, Thierry Tartarin

Sustainability and circular economy are high on the political agenda and governments are setting ambitious goals to push forward the transition towards a circular and sustainable future. Digital data sharing infrastructures and other digital technologies play an important role in that transition to enable transparency and visibility in the circular economy flows. Nevertheless, there are socio-technical challenges for achieving such visibility and transparency, as supply chains cross multiple countries and economic zones, data is owned by actors with different concerns, and the data is dispersed in different systems and infrastructures, including blockchain infrastructures, with their own technical complexity and governance. During the presentation, we will reflect on earlier research on digital trade infrastructures for business-government data sharing in cross-border trade conducted in earlier EU projects (ITAIDE, CORE, PROFILE, PEN-CP) and we will discuss how we build upon and extend this research to the context of circular economy monitoring. In addition, we will provide an update and a broad overview of new research projects in the ICT section that relate to the topic of circular economy, namely:    

• The DATAPIPE EU project: research on extended data pipeline for circular economy monitoring with focus on the automotive industry and links to other industries [key researchers Boriana Rukanova, Jolien Ubacht, Yao-Hua Tan, in collaboration with Selinde van Engelenberg]
• CIRPASS EU project: research on Digital Product Passports with focus on textile, batteries and electronics [key researchers Boriana Rukanova, Jolien Ubacht, Yao-Hua Tan] 
• PARSEC EU project: research on use of detection technology in international trade flows [key researchers Boriana Rukanova, Jolien Ubacht, Yao-Hua Tan]
• TITAN EU project: research to create transparency in the food supply chain, TU Delft leads the workpackage on aligning technological solutions with the specific contexts of different supply chains [key researchers Selinde van Engelenberg, Marijn Janssen, Siu Lie Tan]
• PhD project on the use of drones for circular value creation: the research aims to understand what circular value creation can emerge from the use of drones for organizations and create a framework/tool to map it [key researcher Thierry Tartarin, Mark de Reuver- promotor, Linda Kamp- supervisor (and co-promotor)] 

These projects provide a broad overview of current research in the ICT section on the use of digital data sharing infrastructures and other digital technologies in the context of circular economy monitoring and can serve as a basis for further discussion.