R-Cycle provides digital product passports for GS1 Germany’s new “Circular Plastics Traceability” guidelines

05 Sep 2023 --- R-Cycle has helped develop GS1 Germany’s “Circular Plastics Traceability” guidelines to offer plastic value chain stakeholders a uniform framework to model corresponding cross-company processes and exchange data.

The software solutions provider offers digital product passports (DPPs), through which data can be transmitted across companies and products can be traced. R-Cycle’s DPP for plastic packaging is in accordance with the new GS1 Germany guideline. 

GS1 Germany, known for standards and solutions around barcodes, published the guidelines as a basis for numerous global identification and information processes. The best-known example is the barcodes used in international trade, which are scanned more than six billion times daily, according to the company.

“More than 45 leading global industrial companies and organizations already rely on R-Cycle as a solution for the DPP. The GS1 ‘Circular Plastics Traceability’ guideline now gives our customers additional planning security to use an open, standards-compliant and future-proof solution with R-Cycle,” says Dr. Benedikt Brenken, director at R-Cycle.

Creating standardization
GS1 Germany says standardized product data exchange is “the basis for efficient and sustainable value chains.”

R-Cycle’s DPP provides information on all relevant ingredients of plastic packaging.The underlying technology in digital packaging solutions is the cross-industry and internationally established GS1 Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) interface. EPCIS is GS1’s core standard for improving transparency in companies or value networks.

The interface provides a common language for capturing and exchanging what are known as EPCIS events. The events provide companies with the vital information of packaging that passes through business processes.

This information is transmitted and enriched throughout the packaging lifecycle, simplifying data management and offering “enormous potential for the manufacturing process and recycling,” according to R-cycle.

DPP’s recycling aid
R-cycle explains the plastics industry – especially in the packaging sector – is confronted with increasing industrial and legal information and reporting requirements. Recyclability assessments, EPR schemes and plastic tax calculations are a few examples.

The otherwise “time-consuming and costly generation of the relevant data can be done at the push of a button” with R-cycles DPP. 

The DPP provider also says that its digital solution enables better recycling to recover high-quality recyclates. Using the information stored in the DPP, waste sorting facilities can precisely categorize recyclable packaging and form recycling-friendly, single-sort fractions.

“To support high-quality recycling and a sustainable raw material cycle of plastic packaging, efforts are required from all stakeholders involved. Therefore, we are very pleased to drive the transformation toward an [environmentally] sustainable circular economy,” asserts Sarah Grede, senior manager Sustainability at GS1 Germany.

Edited by Sabine Waldeck