With growing sustainability policies, reporting requirements and business focus on packaging, companies need to exchange packaging data with various stakeholders for regulatory compliance and environmental assessments.

However, accessing and exchanging accurate, consistent, and comprehensive packaging data in a timely manner is a common challenge across industries. Companies invest significant resources to gather and interpret packaging data due to the misalignment of data semantics and schemes across hundreds or thousands of suppliers and customers.

In collaboration with Anthesis, we reviewed data requirements from packaging related-regulations and then examined how packaging data is categorized and reported across industry data models, and publicly accessible standards. 

Findings highlight two major challenges:

• A lack of alignment in the terminology used across data models and standards when describing packaging materials. Approaches to material categorization vary significantly across data models; a similar misalignment exists in the grouping of packaging types. This creates barriers when sharing data as models may classify packaging differently.
• Inconsistencies in the aggregation level at which the respective platforms collect and present the data points. The earlier and more granular this data collection is, the more useful it can be downstream for a multitude of requirements, assuming its proper transmission to other partners in the value chain.

As next steps, we will explore the potential to use the open-source standard developed by Open Data Manchester (Open 3P) as an advanced point of departure to drive the refinement and adoption of a global standard for packaging data capture and for data sharing in the circular packaging value chain.