Digital Twins for Complex Circular Value Networks

Written By Julian Lauten-Weiss

By Alejandra Pita Milleiro

Circular economy is often explained with a simple image: instead of taking resources, making products, using them, and throwing them away, we should keep materials in use for as long as possible minimizing consumption. This idea is easy to understand. The hard part is making it work in real life.

A circular system is not a straight line. It is a network. A food package, for example, is connected to raw material suppliers, packaging designers, converters, food producers, retailers, logistics companies, consumers, municipalities, waste operators, recyclers, regulators, and technology providers. Each actor makes decisions that affect the others. A material that is excellent for protecting food may be difficult to recycle. A reusable packaging system may reduce waste, but only if washing, collection, return logistics, and consumer participation work well. A recyclable package may still end up incinerated if local infrastructure cannot sort it correctly.

This is why circularity cannot be reduced to “recycling more”. Recycling is important, but it is only one part of the picture. Circularity also involves product design, material selection, production efficiency, shelf life, reuse, repair, collection, sorting, recycling, business models, regulation, and consumer behaviour. Europe’s packaging challenge shows the scale of the issue: in 2023, the EU generated 79.7 million tonnes of packaging waste, equivalent to 177.8 kg per inhabitant. Plastic packaging waste alone represented 15.8 million tonnes.

At the same time, the global pressure on resources is increasing. UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 warns that, without urgent action, global resource extraction could rise by 60% by 2060 compared with 2020 levels. In this context, managing circularity by intuition, isolated spreadsheets, or single-actor decisions is no longer enough.

This is where digital twins become useful.

A digital twin can be understood as a living digital representation of a real system. It is not just a database, a dashboard, or a one-off simulation. According to NIST, a successful digital twin is “not a static model” but a dynamic, data-driven virtual representation. In simpler terms, a digital twin is like a rehearsal space for complex decisions. It allows users to ask: what happens if we change this material, introduce a reuse model, improve sorting efficiency, increase recycled content, or apply a new policy?

For circular value networks, this “what-if” capacity is essential. A digital twin can connect data from different life-cycle stages and help users see consequences that would otherwise remain hidden. It can combine information on materials, manufacturing, transport, use, waste generation, collection routes, sorting technologies, recycling performance, costs, environmental impacts, and consumer behaviour. It can then test scenarios before changes are implemented at full scale.

This does not mean that digital twins provide perfect answers. They depend on data quality, assumptions, model design, and stakeholder trust. But they can support better questions. They help move circular economy decisions from isolated fragments to system-level thinking.

The policy context is also moving in this direction. The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation entered into force on 11 February 2025 and will generally apply from 12 August 2026. It covers all packaging and packaging waste and sets requirements for manufacturing, composition, reusability, recoverability, waste management, and prevention. The same European Commission page highlights that 40% of plastics used in the EU are in packaging and that half of marine litter is from packaging. These policy changes increase the need for tools that can compare options across the whole system, not only at the end-of-life stage.

The MAGNO project provides a practical example of how a Digital Twin can be applied to the food packaging sector. MAGNO aims to improve packaging effectiveness, sustainability, efficient use, end-of-life management, reuse, recycling, and innovative business practices in EU food systems.

To do this, MAGNO does not treat food packaging as a single product or a single waste stream. It treats it as a value network. This means looking at the full system around packaging: raw materials, design, manufacturing, food protection, logistics, consumer use, collection, sorting, recycling, reuse, regulation, market uptake, and environmental impact.

What MAGNO does

In practical terms, the MAGNO Ecosystem Digital Twin is designed to help evaluate the whole food packaging value chain, from raw materials and packaging design to manufacturing, use, and end-of-life. It works as a “what happens if” tool: a way to test possible strategies, identify trade-offs, discard options that are unlikely to work, and optimise those with greater potential.

For this to be credible, data infrastructure is essential. MAGNO’s database for the Digital Twin integrates heterogeneous datasets from value chain analysis, packaging design, material characterisation, and end-of-life scenarios. It is built to support the modelling of pollution impacts and the analysis of circular economy options for the food packaging value chain. The database uses a PostgreSQL structure, automated data processing pipelines, validation rules, security controls, and interoperability principles to support the Digital Twin.

MAGNO also shows why context matters. Its work on packaging waste collection and sorting highlights that there is no single “best” collection or sorting technique for all circumstances. The effectiveness of a solution depends on territorial characteristics such as population density, urban or rural context, existing infrastructure, local governance, the type of packaging waste collected, and the polymer composition of the material stream. This is exactly the kind of complexity a Digital Twin can help manage: not by pretending that one solution fits everywhere, but by comparing options under different local conditions.

For example, the Digital Twin could help explore questions such as:

·      Would a mono-material package improve recyclability without compromising food protection?

·      Would a deposit-return system perform better in one region than another?

·      What happens if consumer sorting accuracy improves?

·      How would different collection systems affect recycling quality, transport emissions, and costs?

·      What trade-offs appear if a bio-based material is introduced?

·      Which solution performs best when environmental, economic, technical, regulatory, and social indicators are considered together?

This is the real value of Digital Twins for circular value networks. They do not replace stakeholders, regulation, experimentation, or political judgement. Instead, they provide a shared evidence base. They make trade-offs visible. They allow companies, policymakers, waste managers, recyclers, researchers, and citizens to discuss circular strategies using a more complete picture of the system.

Want to know more? Join our workshop!

In the transition to circular food packaging, the challenge is not only to invent better materials or improve recycling technologies. It is to understand how design, production, use, behaviour, infrastructure, policy, and markets interact. Digital Twins offer a way to navigate that complexity. They help us move from asking “Is this product recyclable?” to asking “Under which conditions does this solution actually reduce impacts across the whole system?”

That shift is essential. Circularity is not a single action at the end of a product’s life. It is a coordinated system of decisions. Digital Twins can help us see that system, test possible futures, and choose strategies that are not only promising on paper, but workable in the real world.

To share this work with a wider audience, MAGNO will organise a free online workshop on 18 June, where the project’s Ecosystem Digital Twin will be presented and discussed with stakeholders interested in sustainable food packaging, circular economy, digital tools, and value chain innovation.

The workshop will be an opportunity to see how the Digital Twin is being developed, understand what types of scenarios it can support, and provide feedback to help refine the tool so that it responds to real needs across the packaging value network. You can find more information and register here.

You can also follow MAGNO updates here:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/magno-eu-project/

Want to know how to change your behaviour as consumer?

https://magno-project.eu/category/magno-consumers-insights/

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency, REA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

MAGNO Partners: CETEC, DNV, EUPC, Fraunhofer IVV, HOLOSS, IDENER.AI, INSTM, IRIS, KVELOCE, University of Balamand, University of Sousse.

References

Julian Lauten-Weiss
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