Swedish Mining Innovation’s strategic investment Tracemet, the pilot project to develop a traceability system for metals, has been ongoing since December 2019. We have received an update from project leader Erik Lindblom at IVL Swedish Environmental Institute.
Soon halfway through the project, how is it going?
– Above expectations, there is a high level of commitment and participation from all our industry partners. It is very gratifying, especially given the difficult circumstances prevailing at the moment.
What have you come up with?
– We have tackled a lot of questions about what requirements such a system must meet. We are now working as hard as we can to find out which route choices this entails.
How difficult is it to create a new system of this type?
– It is difficult in the sense that our final vision changes over time. The biggest challenges are not technical, but rather to find a system that manages trust between users. Blockchain technology is based on sharing data between all users and this type of data that we need to track the metals is not currently shared between the various players in the value chain.
How do you create that trust?
– The method we have chosen is to have the entire value chains in the same project where we work closely together, with a large degree of openness in the project discussions. We simply start by building trust within the project group in order to be able to discuss trust between the organizations and thereby lay the foundation for a functioning system.
What will happen to the results of the pilot project?
– What we develop is a system that will clearly show the functionality. Together with the joint development process, it will be a basis for helping the actors to make an initiated decision on the question of whether it is worth investing in developing this traceability system sharply, if the possible benefit of such a system outweighs the efforts it will require.
The interview is produced by Tracemet’s project owner Svemin and published on the project’s website by the project leader IVL Swedish Environmental Institute.
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