- Funding Programme
- Year
- 2022
Digital Infrastructures for the Circular Economy in The Netherlands
The European Commission and the DATAPIPE project aimed to help the Customs Administration of the Netherlands and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management of the Netherlands to be better equipped to meet their responsibilities in the context of the circular economy.
Context
The Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan and national policies aim to retain value of products, reduce the use of primary materials and eliminate waste. Monitoring the practical implementation of circular economy policies and instruments is challenging and when borders are crossed customs authorities continue to play a key role. Traceability of product and their material composition is of key importance for trade to enable recovery of high-quality secondary materials and to allow companies to show compliance. Achieving such traceability is very hard, as information is held by multiple actors in complex supply chains.
Support delivered
A research partner has assisted the beneficiaries with apply the “data pipeline” concept, a digital innovation that allows data sharing among supply chain partners, to the automotive industry. The support included a problem analysis report, a comprehensive concept analysis and blueprint for piloting, and (3) recommendations and follow-up plan. These allowed the Customs Administration to reuse business data from the source (provided on voluntary basis) for government control purposes. A closing event was organised in hybrid mode on 11 December 2024 to discuss the project’s work and the planned follow-up actions.
Results achieved
The outcomes of the project were:
- A semantic data-sharing architecture and a demo of how authorities can access and use Digital Product Passport data for circular economy and sustainability monitoring, including development of the Trusted Trade Lane concept (in customs);
- An approach for how Privacy-Enhancing Technologies can be used by businesses to share data with governmental organisations without disclosing commercially sensitive information.
The result is the extended data pipeline concept for the digitization and monitoring of the circular economy, which will enable sharing of data on material composition and production processes. The concepts can be subsequently applied to other industries.
Useful links
More about the project
You can read the documents related to the project here: