Digital product passport : stimulating mulch film recycling in Chinese agriculture

AUTHOR : Michael ZIEGLER, Communication Manager, R-Cycle Initiative & DR. Benedikt BRENKEN Director, R-Cycle Initiative & Heino CLAUSSEN-MARKEFKA, Managing Director, ProData GmbH

In order to face today’s challenges, agriculture still needs to adapt and reinvent itself, without ever losing sight of the fact that innovation is first and foremost a matter of sharing skills and experience. The R-Cycle project and its digital passport are clear proof of this.

Mulch films have become an indispensable part of today’s agriculture and are also widely used internationally to conserve resources and increase crop yields. Especially in densely populated China, agriculture has to perform at its best in order to be able to supply people with sufficient food. Every year, about 1.4 million tonnes of mulch film are applied in China – that is about 74 percent of global consumption. It is important to act as ecologically as possible.

One problem with the use of mulch films is that collection, especially the manual collection of used mulch films, is very labour-intensive and time-consuming. Especially when thinner films are used, as it is quite common in China, most of the mulch films break into smaller pieces and remain on the field, polluting the environment. As part of the develoPPP.de programme of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the extrusion line manufacturer Reifenhäuser and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) GmbH have launched a pilot project to establish a system to prevent soil pollution from mulch

film residues in China. In this pilot project, the tracking of mulch films along their life cycles becomes possible with the help of the digital product passport R-Cycle and thus the actual recycling of applied film is measurable.

R-CYCLE – The digital product passport for plastics

A digital product passport (DPP) is a system for collecting, aggregating, and providing data for a product along its life cycle. The R-Cycle system provides a data infrastructure for the operation of digital product passports for plastic products. R-Cycle has been developed to market readiness by various technology companies and organisations along the entire value stream of plastic products. The traceability technology behind R-Cycle is based on established standards from GS1 – the leading global standards organisation and a founding member of R-Cycle. The best-known GS1 standard is probably the barcode, which is scanned more than six billion times worldwide every day.

R-Cycle provides a turnkey solution in the form of an interoperable infrastructure as software-as-a-service. This is accessible for every stage in the entire life cycle of plas-tics and provides the basis for a data-based, efficient and thus sustainable handling of plastics in the sense of a true circular economy.