Work package 1: DATA DRIVEN SORTING, ANALYSIS AND TRACEABILITY

James Veale has a 30-year career in commodity trading. In 2020, he and his business partner founded GreenToken, a company that uses digital twin tokens on a blockchain ledger to represent mixed flows of bulk commodities. He now leads the sales and marketing arm of this company.

What is the role of Work Package 1 in the INCREACE project?

”GreenToken provides the material traceability solution described in WP1. We assign digital twin tokens on a blockchain to small amounts of waste material – e.g. 1 token can equal 1KG of waste material and possible tokens represent the entire material (e.g. 1000 tokens would represent 1 MT of waste plastic). Typically, waste plastic is grouped somehow – materials are sorted differently – e.g. plastic from post-consumer waste may get 1 green token per KG of waste, plastic from post-industrial waste may get 1 blue token per kg, etc. The tokens may also contain other interesting information, such as discrepancies or abnormalities in reported yields or purities, etc. As the plastic waste is recycled by mechanical or chemical means (or both), the token is what happens to the plastic waste. In this way, successive processes applied to the raw material of the waste material, such as post-processing (WP2) through to final application (WP4), are also applied to the tokens representing that digital twin mass, with the appropriate yield at each stage.”

What are the main goals and tasks of your Work Package?

”To fully track the flow of waste material through the various recycling stages, building a chain of custody from the origin of the waste to the final circular product. The tokens then become the guarantee that the plastic has been recycled.”

What challenges do you face within the Work Package and how are you addressing them?

”Our biggest challenge so far has been understanding the waste and recycling/processing flow. With 17 partners in INCREACE, including waste producers, waste recyclers and research institutions, we have found that there is no natural linkage between the partners. Therefore, we encourage them to create virtual links so that we can simulate the material flow to prove that GreenToken provides the required proof.”

Could you tell us about the partners involved in the Work package and the reasons for their participation?

”KU Leuven is an international research institute and their role is to help us understand what information our tokens need to contain to comply with EU circular plastic regulations.”

What do you anticipate the impact of your work package to be?

”Full and complete supply chain transparency, from waste material inputs through multiple supply chain partners performing value-adding processes, such as recycling, to the final product, with GreenTokens tokens demonstrating the percentage of recycled material in the supply chain.”

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