As part of a collaboration between GS1 and the HolyGrail 2.0 initiative, ground-breaking digital technology is being developed to create an intelligent sorting system, driven by GS1’s GTIN standard.
The primary objective of this new system is to fulfill the aims of the circular economy, also bearing in mind that from January 2030, all plastic packaging sold in the European Union must be recyclable. To this end, it is essential to create an open data architecture to improve the sorting of post-consumer waste and ensure that discarded packaging enters the correct material stream.
Already established as an industry standard in several sectors, with numerous applications and more than 10 billion scans per day, the GS1’s GTIN standard was chosen by HolyGrail 2.0 to bring this solution to the market.
GS1 is thus helping to establish open architecture data management, helping to digitise the packaging sorting process through an open and interoperable system, which is expected will then go beyond the initiative and take on a large scale, sparking competition and innovation, involving new stakeholders and, ultimately, achieving a genuine circular economy for packaging.
By applying open standards, choosing a common identifier and creating the concept for interoperable data exchange, this initiative also plans to assign roles and responsibilities to each stakeholder in the value chain, so that everyone understands the objectives and boundaries, and can contribute effectively to the intelligent sorting infrastructure.
The HolyGrail 2.0 initiative is driven by AIM and powered by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, and also brings together more than 160 companies and organisations from across the packaging value chain who have also committed to helping with this endeavour.
