ReCircE

Half of the plastic waste generated throughout Germany is currently recycled for energy, i.e. incinerated. This leads to the destruction of valuable plastic materials and removes them from the circular economy. The main cause of the low recycling rate results from a lack of information in the area of recyclable product design and the material flows generated for recycling.

Therefore, the new ReCircE research project aims to develop a digital “lifecycle file” to increase the transparency of product lifecycles and thus improve the circular economy. The cloud-based lifecycle file shares information with producers and disposers to use the collected data to support more recycling-friendly product development. Also, an AI system combines the lifecycle file data with sensor data from a highly efficient sorting system to improve the precision and efficiency of the sorting process. In addition, a resource efficiency tool is being developed that compares different variants of product design, value chains and recycling processes and optimizes them from an ecological and economic point of view.