From “take - make - waste” to sustainable systems

Five challenges to sustainability

1. In today’s opaque value chains, a lack of transparency on material origin, content, condition and destination create a barrier to improved sustainability. In consumer electronics, only 21 percent of countries collect statistics on e‑waste, often reporting metrics that are incompatible. In a consumer survey on plastic packaging, 34 percent of respondents named lack of information as the most common barrier to plastic recycling.
2. Companies continue to use linear product design. Circular design alternatives are often not understood, considered or contextualized. Over 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact is influenced during the design process, but today’s product designs are increasingly complex – integrated for low cost and high performance, not sustainability.
3. It is difficult to develop viable circular business models in today’s linear systems. We call that linear lock-in. Current infrastructure makes it hard to ascertain the condition and value of used products.
4. Inefficient waste collection and reverse logistics hinder economies of scale. In consumer electronics, 80 percent of global e‑waste is not documented for recycling, and is most likely landfilled, traded or processed informally. Plastic packaging recovery rates in high‑income countries are relatively high, but recycling rates are much lower. In 2016, the EU’s recovery rate was 74.2 percent; its recycling rate was 42.4 percent.
5. Today’s insufficient sorting and pre-processing infrastructure are an issue. For high-quality material recovery, waste streams must be separated into homogenous material streams. Today, those streams are often cross‑contaminated. Without economies of scale, the process is expensive.

Innovative solutions for sustainability: A sampling

Blockchain can help Consumer Electronics and Plastics Packaging companies embed transparency into a product. Information on product origin, contents and condition can be communicated securely to selected value chain players via a digital product passport that travels with the product throughout the chain.

Machine vision and robotics enable hyper-intelligent sorting of plastic waste. Machine vision solutions can combine a camera, an AI algorithm and a robotic arm to pick waste off a conveyor belt, sorting it by material, polymer type and even brand. Such solutions are highly scalable as the data it collects as it identifies materials can be stored in a cloud neural network to improve the learning algorithm across all installations. The solution can also detect contamination levels in plastic streams, providing valuable information on their purity and quality.

Sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) can play a major role once a product moves out of the design phase and begins its useful life. They can help brand owners monitor and extend that life through remote maintenance, device upgrades and other targeted service-based solutions.

Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies