Circular Economy
Businesses are now making transformational change, shifting towards service- and value-based business models that better utilise our planet’s valuable resources and materials.
This transition requires digital innovation to build circular systems that scale across the value chain, to ensure economic viability, operational efficiency and environmental impact.
At Pragmatic, we focus on creating inspiring ways to reduce, reuse and recycle products and materials. Creating new capabilities, by making objects connected & intelligent:
- Traceability – Item-level identification, Supply-chain visibility
- Sustainability – Reuse & Recycling systems
- Interactivity – Digital engagement and marketing
- Authenticity – Anti-counterfeit, Grey market prevention
Creating a more circular economy
We want to make a positive contribution to ensuring that our planet’s valuable resources are kept in circulation for as long as possible. The transition to a circular economy requires systems to be traceable, leveraging digital technologies and using detailed data analytics. Our technology creates new capabilities in the circular economy by making individual items connected and intelligent. We are excited to enable multiple applications to provide effective mechanisms for recycling and reuse, which consumers can engage with wherever and whenever.
Our technology can be applied to packaging and detected by smart bins when returned at-home or on-the-go, complementing Deposit Return Schemes (DRSs), to improve recycling outcomes. We also enable cutting-edge re-use and re-fill models, both vital for the circular economy.
And it doesn’t stop there – by improving the quality of the recyclate from material recovery facilities, we will ensure more packaging can be returned back to its original purpose rather than being down-cycled, used for energy-to-waste or landfilled. We are also proud that our technology is being used to enable tracking of goods to ensure that they are sent to the recovery facilities, ensuring that illegal tipping is reduced.
Enabling more traceability
Item-level traceability is not only valuable during the useful life of a product, but also at end-of-life. Being able to uniquely identify individual items of waste allows dramatically improved recycling outcomes. Use cases include waste sorting, smart bins, deposit return schemes, regulatory compliance, and real-time reporting to support improved infrastructure planning. For example, we are working with waste data aggregation and analytics firm Topolytics on a DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) project to deliver the UK’s first comprehensive digital waste tracking solution.
Our RFID Flexible IC devices enable mass-market item-level track and trace, ensuring supply chain efficiency, inventory accuracy, authenticity and anti-counterfeit, grey market prevention, retail loss prevention and many more applications.
By adding item level unique IDs, it is possible to activate multiple touchpoints that link to positive outcomes, reducing waste and unnecessary product miles.
Creating more sustainable consumption
Food poverty is a major global problem, and by reducing our own waste we can contribute the maximum to helping others. To do this we need to monitor and protect food, from farm to fork. Our technology is being used to verify and authenticate cold chains, combined with novel sensors. As well as improving resource utilisation, this also promotes consumer awareness of provenance and animal welfare. And by removing the need for destructive in-line testing and conservative use-by dates, we can assure consumers that their food is safe while simultaneously reducing the packaging and food miles associated with products that would otherwise be discarded.
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