Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1500520
28 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2023 Just one example would be the proportion of CO 2 emitted by a truck which is transporting the materials from the suppliers, in addition to the CO 2 emitted during the materials' manu- facture. Each sustainability project, developed with such a narrow set of attributes, should cre- ate some form of sustainability passport that potentially includes: • Information related to the reuse, repur- pose, and recycling of information • Details of materials and minerals used • eir origin and transfer of responsibility through the supply network • Quality assurance and provenance While it is nice to see immediate results from current projects, many fundamental issues and challenges have arisen related to scalability, and ironically, sustainability. ese include: • Costs: Each project must develop its own IT infrastructure, perform the necessary soware coding, and develop the required data models and data sharing mechanisms, oen as customised add-ons to existing solutions. • Ownership: Investors in each project may be companies that their peers or compet- itors may prefer to keep distanced, and which prevents wider adoption. • Dependencies: Many companies prefer to avoid uncontrollable dependencies, such as a specific solution provider's technology behind the project. • Interoperability: Cost of ownership and operation escalate exponentially as data from different projects and initiatives need to be connected and translated, as required by the many instances of materials in the supply network. • Compatibility: e data models within each project are likely not comparable, in terms of both the representation of data and measurement methods, resulting in unreliability and inconsistencies. • Security: Projects typically require the mass sharing of data and new storage requirements that risk IP leakage—espe- cially where third parties are involved—to translate data between projects and pro- vide storage. • Privacy: Data mandated for sharing may include access which should be held pri- vate to the company. is disincentivises expansion beyond the simplistic scope of an initial project. • Greenwashing: e sheer complexity of methods of data representation and mea- surement across different projects lends itself to abuse. e narrower the scope and scale of each individual project, the less important these points may seem to be. However, let's fast-for- ward into the future, and consider the poten- tial burden that this activity would represent if le unchecked. Take, for example, an e-mobil- ity product, such as an electric car. ink about the complexity of the supply network, which consists of thousands of materials of different types, each coming through unique paths and processes. ey have different origins, hierar- chies of complex assemblies, and composite materials that include body parts, electronics modules, batteries, motors, and interior mate- rials. e methods and requirements for sustain- ability for each group of materials is likely to be very diverse. When you connect data from these disparate sources you will have a variety of solutions to consider. Combining data with its own measurement methods, terminolo- gies, and methods of data encoding, then try- ing to extract and contextualize what's useful, will require a case-by-case customization. e sheer IT resources needed to hierarchically "connect" all the potential data points and cre- ate a normalized set of reliable and consistent product information is immense. Alternatively, there are steps the industry can take collectively toward creating an interoper-