What is GS1’s role in sustainability?

With stricter requirements in place requiring companies to share data from the entire value chain, including sourcing of goods and services, processing of products, transport and distribution, and finally end-of-life treatment such as recycling of products, there is an important and strategic role to play for GS1, enabling industry’s green transformation with GS1 standards underpinning the digital exchange of sustainability and circularity data. In general terms the role of GS1 in sustainability is the same as for other business activities, which is to underpin the digital exchange of (product / location / event) data based on unique identification and standardised data. While GS1 has been supporting industry with these processes for many years, the new challenge is to also incorporate the use cases for sustainability that would require new sets of data to be exchanged in what sometimes can be different processes in a company’s supply chain. For example the exchange of carbon footprint data, facilitating carbon transparency and ESG reporting. However, use cases can also be already existing, such as packaging master data, where the programme is putting the topic into the right context associated with emerging requirements in markets, for example around packaging material reporting and extended producer responsibility.