Data is the new oil. To achieve a sustainable circular economy, change at a large scale is not going to happen unless data is structured and shared through global and open standards, also tailor-made to regions respectively.
The fundamental concept behind the circular economy is to enable product data to be shared among all entities involved or simply interested, in many different purposes and perspectives.
This concept implies a significant change because data is still considered from a closed proprietary perspective for many players. However, Circular Economy shows that the value of data stands in its use and this concept encourages companies to use and share open data.
To allow all actors of the value chain from governments, policymakers, and county governments to sip through municipalities and be adopted by the people, we need to take advantage of the potential of data and enable the circular economy. Therefore, open standards must be given.
The data is in the form of ;
🌍 Organization’s waste stream.
This could be by printing unnecessarily, or the production process might be having a higher percentage of waste due to a loose valve, using 50,000 liters of water in the farm, via tank as opposed to implementing drip irrigation or reusing the excess water, etc.
🌍 Amount of raw materials used in production.
The best example is a cooking oil manufacturing plant, They redesign materials, products, and services to be less resource intensive, and recapture “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.
🌍 Energy consumption.
Solar energy results in sustainable business. It may be capital-intensive as it is a one-off installation. However, the future benefits supersede the continuous use of coal or electricity which is detrimental to our environment & serves as an adverse risk for climate change.
🌍 Customer feedback.
More often than not SMEs (me included & I’ll share this story another day), fall into the passion of creating something that WE think will be good for the consumer. However, it ends up that the consumer is not ready for the product or falls a miss, after the use of resources that would have rather not gone to waste. For circularity, collectively examine the touch points, contexts, and qualities (TCQ) to understand the key factors that inform the decision of consumers, Of course in line with the organization.
It’s not a one-part decision to transition to a circular economy and no two nations can follow identical transition paths, but data needs to remain relatively the same. all countries require insight into their current baseline, a sense of which interventions may be most relevant to their context, and which outcomes may stem from their implementation.
