Circular economy solutions

Build a regenerative business, manage material flows, and embed circularity into core business processes.​
A woman recycling plastic in a bin

Transform business and value chains for a circular economy with SAP solutions

Eliminate waste, optimize resource use, and innovate regenerative business models to build transparent and sustainable supply chains.

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Eliminate. Circulate. Regenerate.

Hear from Stephen Jamieson, Global Head of Circular Economy Solutions at SAP, about how SAP Responsible Design and Production can help your business transition to more sustainable products and packaging. The solution provides intelligence that allows you to monitor, measure, and act, so you can eliminate waste, circulate materials, and regenerate natural systems.

Eliminate waste and pollution

Identify problematic products and materials, enabling your business to switch to more sustainable solutions.

Circulate materials and keep products in use

Circulate products and materials at their highest value by validating material provenance from origin to fate, opening new markets, and enabling new business models.

Regenerate natural systems

Empower business decision makers with insight on land-use impact and the strategies to support the regeneration of nature.

EPR regulations in the USA

Hear from industry experts, SAP customers and partners, with experience navigating these regulations globally to prepare for their implications in the United States.

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Featured circular economy solutions to build a regenerative business

Implement comprehensive value chain transparency and extend sustainability initiatives - from raw materials sourcing to last-mile logistics and product returns and recycling - improving the environment, your business, and people's lives.

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Sustainable product designs

Optimize material choices by calculating extended producer responsibility (EPR) obligations, plastic taxes, and corporate commitments.

  • Calculate fees and taxes accurately and implement measures to reduce regulatory costs

  • Identify the right trade-offs and simplify the strategic portfolio decision-making process

  • Transition to a circular product portfolio and deliver on zero-waste commitments

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Prove the sustainability of your raw materials

Discover how SAP Green Token can help you account for differentiated and comingled streams of materials in a way that keeps your ERP core clean and simple.

  • Cloud deployment

  • Support for multiple material attributes

  • Open APIs for automation and integration with ERP and more

  • Support for standards such as ISCC, RSPO, REDcert, and EUDR

  • Auditable, indisputable record for comprehensive traceability

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Streamline product compliance and mitigate risk

Manage regulatory and sustainability requirements, track registrations and substance volumes, classify products, create compliance documents, and package, transport, and store hazardous materials properly with accurate labeling.

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Closely monitor waste generation

Manage your environmental impact, and enable a compliant and transparent waste disposal process.

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Closing raw material loops

Optimize the management of waste collection, recycling, and environmental service contracts with a view to closing circular raw material loops with dedicated industry processes.

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Intelligent agriculture

With data science and machine learning capabilities, you can harness the power of your data to optimize plan-to-harvest processes.

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Full transparency for ethical sourcing

Empower your agribusiness company to recycle more by connecting smallholder farmers to your agriculture supply chain and get full transparency into the source of your raw materials.

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Returnable packaging

Facilitate circular logistic flows for containers, pallets, and other packaging by integrating multiple back-end systems and enabling collaboration with partners.

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Product lifecycle management

Enable faster and better decisions to meet highly variable and individualized customer requirements for sustainable resource management and product compliance.

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Returns management

Maximize margins on returns, protect your brand, drive carbon-friendly return options, and reduce the amount of goods that end up in landfills.

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Reduce food and goods waste

Use the replenishment planning add-on to lessen costs and waste through effective and efficient replenishment of goods, and getting the right products to the right store at the right time.

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Circular commerce management

Our modular recommerce solution supports circular commerce management, enabling you to engage with shoppers, facilitate key recommerce operations and business processes, capture data, and own the product lifecycle.

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Strategic sourcing

Discover qualified suppliers, speed up sourcing cycles, and create agreements for sustainable sourcing savings.

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Material traceablity and supply chain visibility

Leverage blockchain technology to capture the complete material provenance from raw material to finished product, and share information efficiently and securely.

See how our customers are succeeding with circular economy software from SAP

Piloting blockchain technology to support deforestation-free palm oil

Learn how Unilever is piloting SAP Green Token to further increase traceability and transparency in Unilever’s global palm oil supply chain.

Making wine with full-bodied sustainability

See how wine and spirits producer González Byass is eliminating waste while regenerating the land with SAP solutions for sustainability and circular economy.

Easing tax compliance and green impact

Learn how Henkel is committed to leadership in plastics reduction and offering greener options for customers using SAP Responsible Design and Production.

Easing tax compliance and green impact

Learn how Zamora Company, a popular maker of premium spirits and wines, is using SAP Responsible Design and Production to adhere to new packaging taxes in Spain.

Hilti Group measures circularity with SAP Business Technology Platform

Hilti Group's Caroline Stern, Head of Circular Economy, discusses how the company worked with BCG and used its Circelligence tool to automate the calculation of circularity scores for the company.

Creating better patient outcomes and experiences

Learn how harmonized packaging data helps medical technology company Siemens Healthineers better measure its sustainability performance.

See what analysts are saying about SAP

Meet sustainability goals with ERP-centered, AI-driven solutions

This IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by SAP, explores how to keep pace with sustainability compliance and manage ESG data with accurate, auditable results.

Sustainable design for packaging

Learn about sustainable design rules from SAP and industry experts.

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Are you ready to tackle plastic tax and EPR regulations?

Learn how SAP can help you address plastic pollution and extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations with speed and scale.

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Managing plastic taxes and EPR regulations

Navigate the complexities of plastic taxes and extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations while guiding your business toward a sustainable future.

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How to comply with plastic packaging taxes and other EPR requirements

Discover how connecting your end-to-end supply chain processes can help you comply with the growing number of extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations around the world – including the new UK Plastic Packaging Tax (PPT).

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Helping organizations tackle plastic pollution

Accenture’s Wesley Spindler and SAP’s Stephen Jamieson discuss the challenges that organizations need to overcome when tackling plastic waste, to deliver true sustainable impact with speed and scale.

Resources

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The future of packaging: From recycling to regeneration

Competing business and environmental needs can be resolved with continual investment in systems and tangible changes at the brand, product, and network levels.

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The Power of Tokenization

This white paper describes a New Mass Balance Approach to Accelerate Sustainability, Traceability, and Transparency in Chemical & Plastics Supply Chain Networks.

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The future of packaging: From policy to impact

The “take-make-waste” economy is at a tipping point, with demand for resources contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and inequality. Learn how businesses are embedding circular economy principles into their operations to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate natural systems.

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The future of packaging: Five actions for long term success

Learn the five concrete actions CEOs and their teams can take to ensure long-term success in circular packaging. These recommendations are based on joint research from SAP and Accenture on the current state of plastics packaging in the consumer goods industry.

Partnering for Regenerative Business

SAP is a partner in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s network to deliver circular economy solutions led by regenerative business with customers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and partners.

Reducing plastic waste in Ghana with WEF Plastic Partnership

Multi-stakeholder collaboration plus IT helps the Ghanaian government and manufacturers reduce waste, increase recycling while help plastic pickers in Ghana earn more.

Frequently asked questions

FAQ

Plastic taxes are aimed at reducing the introduction and consumption of new plastic. Plastic tax programs vary by country and may be imposed at different stages of the circular economy. For example, the plastic tax in Italy, Spain, and the UK is imposed at the point of production or importation of non-recyclable plastic packaging, while EU countries overall assess the tax based on the amount of non-recyclable plastic packaging generated as waste. Learn more about plastic tax and how SAP can help you address plastic tax regulations.

Cloud solutions from SAP such as SAP Responsible Design and Production integrate with data sources across your ERP landscape to provide a global view of product and packaging design, manufacturing, and sales processes. You can identify sustainable alternatives to your existing product and material mix and optimize global material flows across supply chains to help ensure that sourcing, product design, production, and packaging aligns with regenerative, circular economy practices.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a waste and pollution management concept that encourages companies to design more sustainable and recyclable products and manufacturing processes. To be compliant, businesses must demonstrate their efforts toward achieving a circular economy model, including product reuse, buyback, recycled content in products, and making products more recyclable. While many companies are self-motivated to be better environmental stewards, EPR takes a more practical approach and recognizes that the best environmental results can be achieved when producers, rather than local governments, are held responsible for the costs of waste management.

Discover how connecting your end-to-end supply chain processes can help you comply with the growing number of extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations around the world – including the new UK Plastic Packaging Tax (PPT).