Management of material lifecycle information to support Circular Economy

Current concern about the risks and potential problems to the environment associated with people lifestyles and even more with the sourcing and production of materials has brought to light the need to pursue more natural and sustainable models for managing resources and waste. For this reason, the Circular Economy addresses the challenges for sustainable production and utilization of planet resources. In particular, the recovery of used materials is a major challenge to be overcome. Although significant improvements have been made, there is still room for further advances. One of the main issue is the availability of frequent information exchanges from all actors in the supply chain, in order to work through all stages of the material lifecycle. Therefore, this work focuses on the study of a framework to manage such information through the use of a digital tool called Material Passport. The objective of the work is to illustrate the framework and apply it in a case study of plastic packaging.