Recycled Material Is Only as Valuable as Its Data Trail

Recycled material has a trust problem. Unlike virgin material, it has a history. And the market is now demanding to see that history in writing.

The law changed in two industries at once

For packaging, the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) has applied since August 2026, and its minimum recycled-content requirements for plastic packaging bite from 2030. Every producer making a recycled-content claim will need to substantiate it.

The automotive side is following the same path: the new EU End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation, agreed by the Parliament and Council in early 2026, phases in recycled-plastic targets for new vehicles — 15% within six years and 25% within ten, with a share of it recovered specifically from end-of-life vehicles.

Two different value chains, one identical consequence: recycled material without a verifiable data trail will be hard to sell, and recycled-content targets without data will be impossible to prove.

Traceability is solved with the value chain, not inside one company

No single company can certify recycled content alone. The recycler knows what went into the batch; the compounder knows what was blended; the converter knows which lot went into which product. The proof only exists when those links connect, which means traceability is something you agree on with your value chain, not something you buy off a shelf.

In practice that starts with surprisingly mundane questions: what identifies a batch, what data follows it from one company to the next, and in what format. (The food industry is a few years ahead here, the GS1 standards behind grocery traceability work just as well for granulate as for groceries.)

Data collection has to happen everywhere and automatically

A data trail is only as strong as its weakest gap. If material data is captured at goods-in and at dispatch but not in between, the chain breaks exactly where the value is added. That is why collection has to live at every step of the process and why it cannot depend on people filling in spreadsheets at the end of a shift.

This is the job of our Owl platform: it collects data at the source, from a single device to a whole line, and ties process events to batches automatically, so the trail builds itself while production runs.

And once the data flows, the carbon footprint comes almost free

The same batch-level data that proves recycled content - material in, energy used, output produced - is what a credible product-level carbon footprint is calculated from. Companies that build the traceability chain for compliance reasons routinely discover they have also built the foundation for footprint calculation, ESG reporting and process improvement. One data chain, many payoffs.

Whether you make packaging, supply the automotive chain, or recycle the material they'll both need: the data trail is becoming the product. Let's talk about where yours has gaps.