The battery, although central to the green transition of road transport, currently suffers from a supply chain that lacks traceability, sustainability, resiliency, and circularity. Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are essential for battery manufacturing. The explosive growth of electric vehicles, driven by climate neutrality policy objectives, will pressure the CRM supply chain and increase EU dependency on third countries, resulting in decreased competitiveness for EU automotive and battery manufacturers. Implementing the digital battery passport (DBP) concept in the battery value chain could resolve these issues. The main goal of the BASE project is to develop, validate, and implement a working DBP service, as mandated by the “Regulation.” This will be achieved by exploiting data collected through a number of constantly evolving tools and methods, ensuring a transparent, secure, and cost-efficient platform operation, while also catalyzing the growth of circular businesses. BASE will develop transparent methodologies to calculate battery performance and ESGE indicators, ensuring traceability down to the CRM level throughout the entire battery value chain. In the physical domain, this will be achieved through the mass balancing approach. On the data management side, by exploiting distributed ledger technology, BASE will ensure built-in data authenticity verification along the value chain, with no data duplication, avoiding data manipulation, assuring privacy by design, and promoting data interoperability. The DBP will provide up-to-date and accurate data on battery performance indicators, remaining useful life, dismantling, material composition, and safety. This will allow for an increase in the useful service life of batteries and more efficient recycling, which will enhance resource efficiency, reduce waste, and decrease EU dependency on CRMs from third countries. The applicability of the DBP will be demonstrated through four pilot use cases.

Remanufacturing is critical for Circular Economies, extending product life, creating jobs and revenue streams, and reducing waste, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. The main challenges that need to be addressed for successful remanufacturing in an industrial value chain or, more appropriately, value cycle are related to process, design, and business models. To meet these challenges, RESTORE will offer sustainable by design remanufacturing process and materials along with supporting tools for digitalization of remanufacturing ecosystem or value chain. RESTORE is aiming to advance potential SoA cladding technologies including laser direct energy deposition, plasma transfer arc process for sustainable remanufacturing application. To increase the deposition rate for large scale applications, we are aiming to develop a novel hybrid process combining laser and PTA process. We are aiming to manufacture wire feedstock with recycled content and develop a wire feeding system coupled with auxiliary feeding system to transfer machining swarf/unused powder directly into the melt pool, this will pave the way to zero waste and low-cost remanufacturing technology. For digitalization, we are also aiming to develop RESTORE platform, which will offer digital technologies and tools, which are digital technologies to increase process automation, recipe book and simulation tools for product and process optimisation, decision support framework, ecoDESIGN framework, blockchain enabled digital product passport, digital marketplace, business model templates, and collaborative spaces that can help to facilitate and streamline the remanufacturing process, providing greater traceability, transparency, and efficiency. The digital collaborative space will bring all relevant actors of the remanufacturing domain under one umbrella to share data and leverage a decision support framework and supporting tool, guiding the optimal remanufacturing of industrial products and components.