Circular Economy: Using Data to Achieve Sustainable Resource Use

A functioning circular economy is of enormous importance for business and industry. This also applies to the automotive industry, which needs to make the use of its complexly produced and expensive components more sustainable. Catena-X, as a network for the automotive industry, has set itself the goal of creating a better data situation about the components and resources used through the trustworthy and sovereign exchange of data on a distributed data platform. One example is the battery passport, which brings together all the information about a battery installed in an e-car, from production to installation and use to secondary recycling.
Circular economy is a top topic for platform research, for example at the MIT Platform Strategy Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in July. If you want to use components as resource-efficiently as possible throughout their entire life cycle, you need an enormous amount of data from a wide range of players who produce the components, use them, repurpose them, and so on. This data must be exchanged and used sensibly with the help of platforms such as Catena-X. The Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST contributes its expertise on data spaces to initiatives such as Catena-X in order to enable data use in the sense of the circular economy. Thus, from a data perspective, the institute makes an important contribution to a sustainable economy in Germany and the world.