TRICK - Empower circular economy with blockchain data traceability

TRICK project is the H2020 funded project for adoption, tracing and demonstration of sustainable approaches by means of an innovative and circular product information management system secured by Blockchain.

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The context

The adoption of sustainable and circular approaches in production is one of these days big topics. The transition from linear to circular economy can’t be delayed anymore and it is strictly connected with the transparency and traceability of the value chains. To put in place aware actions the stakeholders of the supply chains, and the consumers as well, need to have all the pieces of information useful to know the steps of a product life cycle, but the complexity, opacity and fragmentation of the value chains makes it difficult to identify and provide them.

Starting from this background the issue to develop an interoperable and scalable traceability and transparency solution is becoming essential. This statement works for big industries, but it is emphasised for SMEs and small subjects of the supply chains, having more trouble moving towards innovation.

The project and its activities

TRICK EU funded project will deal with this aim starting from the point of view of the Textile and Clothing sector, one of the most polluting and complex domains. The project, started in May 2021, will work for 3 years to support SMEs in the adoption, tracing and demonstration of sustainable approaches by means of an innovative and circular product information management system, based on a data collection platform, secured by Blockchain and integrated with an open marketplace for the matched services. The demonstration will be run in Textile-Clothing and in the Food sector, to demonstrate the replicability of the approach.

TRICK is supported by a consortium of 29 partners from 8 EU countries and 3 extra EU eligible countries, coordinated by F.lli Piacenza S.p.A. an Italian top-brand in luxury fabrics manufacturing. The consortium is composed by stakeholders of the supply chain with the role of end-users together with University and Research Centres, National Agencies public bodies and associations, ITC and tech providers.

TRICK’s platform will provide standardized services targeted on the pilots and useful to implement and trace circular economy practices with reference to environmental, social and health protection domains (e.g. Preferential Certificate of Origin, Product Environmental Footprint, anti-counterfeiting). Afterwards additional services will be joint by means of a marketplace open to third parties’ certified solutions to respond also to the needs of other value chains.

«The main goal of the project is the development of a reliable and secure blockchain-based platform with standardised services for T&C and Food with the distinguishing feature of affordability – explains Mauro Chezzi, vice-director of Sistema Moda Italia, the Italian federation for Textile and Fashion, institutional partner of the project – SMEs often have to face with economic issues related to the costs of complex and forefront technologies such as Blockchain. TRICK aims to solve this gap by supporting the standardization of its information management system and spreading services for the traceability of the supply chains on a great scale»

On the technology and innovation side, next to the platform and the marketplace, the project will deploy Blockchains and related interoperability connectors for the secured data storage and sharing and it will develop addons for B2B marketplace additional services, to enable new developers and providers to offer their solutions.

Finally, TRICK will feed the awareness and improve the guidelines for the implementation of the measures necessary to establish circularity in industry and society, generating a roadmap with a strategic plan, and providing legal standards, semantics and ontologies functional for traceability applications.

The role of eBIZ

One of TRICK's objectives is to improve the digitization of business processes in in TC and Food supply chains, through the adoption and use of semantic standards and reference specifications. The project will contribute to the development of the eBIZ specification: in particular, an extension of it will be developed in order to support data collection for traceability and for the objectives of supporting TRICK services (Certification of preferential origin, circularity, calculation of PEF, Health of the consumer, ethical and social sustainability and the fight against counterfeiting). This is an important extension that will add new application scenarios to the eBIZ specifications allowing for event and certification management.