From Claims to Proof: How Open Data Can Reduce Greenwashing and Enable Circular Economies

Imagine buying food without an ingredient list.

No nutritional information. No allergen warnings. No indication of where the ingredients came from. Just a label claiming the product is "healthy."

Most of us would never accept that level of opacity when it comes to food. Yet we routinely accept it when products claim to be sustainable, carbon neutral, ethically sourced, or made from recycled materials. The European Commission found that 53% of environmental claims were vague, misleading, or unfounded, while 40% lacked supporting evidence.

We often treat greenwashing and circular economy as separate sustainability challenges. This session explores a different perspective: both are fundamentally information challenges.

Open data has transformed industries such as food labeling, logistics, mapping, and finance by making information transparent, interoperable, and reusable. Sustainability may be the next frontier.

This talk explores how open standards, machine-readable schemas, and reusable product information can help move sustainability from marketing claims and PDF reports to verifiable data. Using a smartphone product as an example, we will walk through an open sustainability data model, examine a sample Digital Product Passport implementation, and discuss emerging standards such as JSON-LD and GS1 Digital Link.

The session includes a reference architecture that demonstrates how sustainability information can be captured once and reused across manufacturers, suppliers, consumers, repairers, recyclers, researchers, and regulators. We will also explore practical data-quality measures such as completeness, provenance, traceability, interoperability, and verifiability, and discuss why these metrics may be just as important as sustainability metrics themselves.

While Digital Product Passports provide the motivating use case, the focus of the session is broader: how open-data ecosystems, shared schemas, and reusable information can reduce greenwashing, improve transparency, and enable circular-economy outcomes.

Food labels changed behavior not because consumers suddenly became healthier, but because information became visible. Circular economies are not built on recycled materials alone; they are built on reusable information.

Most of a smartphone's environmental impact is determined long before it is switched on. The materials that go into building it, the way those materials are sourced, repaired, reused, and eventually recycled have a much larger influence than how much electricity the phone consumes during its lifetime.

Likewise, claims about recycled content, repairability, ethical sourcing, or circularity can only be validated if the underlying data exists, is accessible, and can be trusted.

This session explores why open data is not just another building block, but a foundation for reducing greenwashing and enabling circular economies.

Attendees will learn:

• Why sustainability challenges such as greenwashing and circularity are often caused by fragmented, inaccessible, or inconsistent information.

• How open data transformed industries such as food labeling, logistics, and mapping, and why similar principles can be applied to sustainability ecosystems.

• How standards such as JSON-LD, GS1 Digital Link, and Digital Product Passports can help turn sustainability claims into structured, machine-readable data.

• A layered reference architecture that separates data sources, trust and verification mechanisms, open schemas, and consumers of information—making the approach reusable across industries, products, and data formats.

• How the principle of "capture once, reuse many times" can enable manufacturers, consumers, repairers, recyclers, researchers, and regulators to derive value from the same information.

• Why data quality matters as much as data availability, and how measures such as completeness, provenance, traceability, interoperability, and verifiability can be used to assess the health of an information ecosystem.

• Practical patterns for building plug-and-play data ecosystems where standards, schemas, and verification mechanisms can evolve independently without disrupting consumers of information.

• How the same architectural thinking can be applied beyond sustainability to any domain where transparency, interoperability, and trust depend on shared information.