Transparency and traceability for a circular economy
Circularise, founded in 2016 in The Netherlands, is a supply chain transparency start-up that helps plastic manufacturers, brands and OEMs to trace raw materials from source, into parts and ultimately to end products. The company uses blockchain and other cutting edge technologies to enable businesses to share data about their products while retaining privacy over sensitive information.
EIT RawMaterials supports Circularise with EUR 180 000 funding to scale-up their business in the post-economic crisis, as part of the EIT Crisis Response Initiative. The EIT Community launched the EIT Crisis Response Initiative, which directly contributes to the European Union’s response to the COVID-19. The EIT RawMaterials Booster Call in response to the COVID-19 crisis mobilised EUR 9.8 million to provide targeted support to 60 high-impact and growth potential start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs during the crisis.
Data exchange protocol for the circular economy
To carry a systemic transformation to a circular economy, different actors in the value chain need to cooperate and share information about products, materials and supply chains. This rarely happens because the cooperation among businesses often implies increased risks associated with exposing data. Circularise addresses this issue by building a solution that enables value chain actors to share data without ever disclosing their sensitive information.
The EIT RawMaterials Booster funding will support the further development of Circularise’s data exchange protocol that is deemed necessary for the overall functioning of the circular economy.
It is important for all stakeholders in the value chain to communicate with each other and exchange relevant information. This is why Circularise is so interesting for us.
Beant Dijkstra, Business Development Manager at EIT RawMaterials
In the last months, Circularise’s material traceability solution has been embraced by a number of automotive OEMs where plastics supplied by the company’s partners Covestro, Domo and others were traced from raw material production to the final car.
There are two benefits to this. First, Circularise can show the provenance of each part up to individual batch levels. Second, the company can prove and show that the material is sustainable, recycled or for example, carbon-neutral.
We believe this protocol to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the more sustainable and circular future.
Mesbah Sabur, Co-founder of Circularise
Circularise will start moving towards full commercial implementation in 2021. The EIT RawMaterials Booster grant will be used to develop functionalities required to make Circularise’s system ready to scale.
