The other half of the Hitachi-AIST proposal — the one the wiki spent 2026-10-16 looking for. In the CE Association white paper it is named once, as “data model standards for information on goods, including quality-related information”, and never explained. In the lab’s own Third Open Forum report (July 2026) it is presented as “grading for the visualization of residual value”, the second of two “forms of value visualization” in the lab’s rule-making theme, alongside CVP.
⟨Inference: the same object under two names, on the evidence that both are one of exactly two parts of the same proposal by the same people, and that “quality-related information on goods” and “residual value grading” are descriptions of one artefact from the data side and the use side. Not stated by any source. If a later source separates them, this page is wrong and should be split.⟩
What was actually done
A study of plastic-recycling operations, presented by Koshi Kamigaki (AIST), analysing “what types of data support value transfer, and the meaning and context in which such data are utilized”. So: an empirical study of an information flow, not a schema proposal.
Two failures found:
- “Information on end-use applications from the demand side fails to reach collection and sorting operators on the supply side.”
- “Information regarding product quality and provenance fails to reach stakeholders on the downstream sector effectively.”
Three requirements derived:
| Requirement | As stated | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Basic transactions | providing end-use application information on the demand side lets “market participants … more clearly identify selection criteria for transactions" | "improving both transaction success rates and pricing appropriateness” |
| Upstream-downstream information partnership and traceability | ”making available information that substantiates product quality and reliability" | "expand demand for higher-grade recycled materials while reducing uncertainty-related costs” |
| Interoperability | ”by referencing existing international standards" | "residual value can be interpreted consistently across different industries and material types” |
Stated purpose of the three together: “accelerate supply–demand matching and contribute to the development of a deeper and more robust downstream market.”
Why this is the layer SINE’s work touches, and CVP is not
CVP is a ratio over financial-statement items; its authors say it is for “businesses to national governments”. Nothing SINE builds operates on a P&L. This half is different in kind: it is a claim about a physical object — what it is made of, where it came from, what grade it is — that has to travel to a party who cannot inspect the object. That is the same shape as a product carbon footprint, a product passport entry, or a signed sensor reading.
The second requirement names the economic quantity exactly: uncertainty-related costs. A buyer of recycled feedstock discounts for the risk that the grade is not as claimed; a credible claim removes the discount. That is a willingness-to-pay argument for verifiability, made by the counterparty, in their own document.
⟨Inference: and it is a cheaper argument than the carbon one, because the value lands on the party who pays for the verification. In carbon accounting the benefit of a verified figure often accrues to a customer or a regulator; here the sorter who can substantiate grade sells at a higher price. Self-financing verification is rare and worth saying out loud.⟩
⟨Inference: note also which direction the gap runs. Failure 1 is demand-side information failing to reach upstream — what the end-product manufacturer actually needs. That is not a disclosure problem at all; that is a specification-matching problem, and Ichikawa states it independently in the panel: “recyclers often do not have clear visibility into the types of recycled materials that end-product manufacturers actually require.” Only failure 2 is the confidentiality-shaped one. A pitch that treats both as the same problem will be wrong about half of it.⟩
Relationship to the DPP and to the CDD
The lab’s own positioning, from the same report (Hoshino): Europe leads on “information disclosure through DPPs and the development of data spaces on the upstream sector”; Japan’s contribution is “data integration on the downstream sector” and the Common Data Dictionary (CDD), “an online metadata registry for standardized classifications and formalized product descriptions”.
⟨Background: the CDD is IEC’s registry of standardized product classes and properties (IEC 61360 series) — a dictionary of property definitions, not a data-carrying instrument.⟩
⟨Inference: so the architecture being proposed is a vocabulary (CDD) plus a downstream integration layer, referencing but not replacing the DPP. That makes it complementary to the EU instrument rather than a rival, and it explains the silence the earlier search found: a dictionary contribution goes through IEC, not through ISO/TC 323, and would not surface in CVP documents at all. Hitachi’s seat on the IEC SMB (see CECRL) is the matching apparatus.⟩
⟨Inference: unresolved, and worth asking — a grade is an assertion, and a dictionary standardises what the assertion means, not whether it is true. Nothing in the forum report addresses who attests a grade or how a buyer checks one. ISO 59040’s product circularity data sheet is the nearest existing instrument and is not mentioned. That is either a gap in the proposal or a gap in the report.⟩
Corroboration from the rest of the forum
The same need is stated independently by four other participants, which makes it a shared diagnosis rather than one presenter’s framing:
- Hiroko Shinkai (Hitachi Green DX): CE businesses are not commercially viable “unless information on the quality, provenance, quantity, pricing, logistics, etc. of recycled materials can be effectively shared and integrated”; what matters is “not the sheer number of data fields, but whether the information required by the next player in the value chain can be transmitted seamlessly and without interruption”.
- Yoshiaki Ichikawa (ISO/TC 323 WG2 chair): “Quality standards of secondary materials remain underdeveloped globally. So, establishing such standards would create significant value.”
- Keijiro Masui (lab Deputy Director): recovered materials “often exhibit significant variations in quality”, which pushes flexibility requirements upstream.
- Junichiro Mimaki (METI): “Data is a strategic asset for companies” — and his proposed remedy is “deeper trust and stronger collaborative relationships”, i.e. no mechanism.
Plus, from the roadmap presentation, two proposed rule-stage incentives that are verifiable-claim instruments by another name: “digital certification of proper disposal” and “stable access to recovered resources with assured quality and quantity”.
The European counterpart, and the physical precondition ⟨2026-11-06⟩
Source: POLYPROBLEM 06 — Der Circularity Code.
Two findings bear directly on the claim above that this layer is cheaper to monetise than carbon verification because the beneficiary pays.
1. The European instance of the same move. Christian Schiller (cirplus), p. 13, states the information requirement in grading terms — “Um Recyclingströme zu optimieren, brauchen wir Klarheit darüber, wo sich welcher Kunststoff in welcher Zusammensetzung, Qualität und Menge befindet – und das möglichst aktuell” — and reports that his firm initiated and financed the answer: “Deshalb haben wir die DIN SPEC 91446 initiiert und finanziert, den weltweit ersten Standard für hochwertiges Kunststoffrecycling und Digitalisierung.” ⟨Inference: a private firm paying for a public grading standard is the strongest available evidence for the claim on this page that the beneficiary will fund the verification layer — stronger than an intention statement, because the money moved. Note also what it is: a quality-grading standard for recyclates, i.e. the European sibling of H-AIST’s residual-value grading, arrived at independently and three years earlier. Relevant to the parallel DIN SPEC 91446 / EN 18065 thread.⟩
⚠ The source names this standard inconsistently — DIN SPEC 91446 on p. 13,
DIN Spec 19446 on p. 38. Recorded, not resolved.
2. The physical precondition this page assumes. Jochen Moesslein (Polysecure), pp. 14–15: more than half the mass reaching a sorting plant is shredded fragments on which object recognition cannot work, so what is needed is a physical differentiation method operating in ten milliseconds. “Was nützt eine Datenbank, wenn ich einen Eintrag nicht sicher mit der dazugehörenden Datenbank verknüpfen kann?” ⟨Inference: residual-value grading presupposes that the graded object can be re-identified when it arrives. For discrete products — H-AIST’s case — that holds. For comminuted material streams it does not, and the grade has to be re-measured rather than looked up. Worth stating as a scope limit on this page: grading travels with an object, not with a mass.⟩ See digital product passport for the longer treatment.
Open questions
- Is there a document? Everything here is a presentation summary in an event report. No schema, no work item number, no venue beyond the CDD mention. ⟨This is the surviving part of open task 17.⟩
- Which standards does “referencing existing international standards” mean — ISO 59040, the CDD/IEC 61360 series, both?
- Who attests a grade, and against what? (Unaddressed, as above.)
- Does the plastics study exist as a publication, and does it name the operators?
Cross-references
- Third Open Forum report (July 2026) — the only source
- Circular Value-added Productivity (CVP) — the other half of the same proposal
- Hitachi-AIST CECRL — the authors
- Digital Product Passport — the EU instrument it positions against
- Value networks and the ISO 59000 series — ISO 59040 and the standards family
- Confidentiality gap in carbon accounting — the same structure on the carbon side
- Verifiable carbon accounting · Cryptographic trust infrastructure (CCTI stack) — the instruments that would answer “who attests a grade”
Sources
sources/hitachi/2026-07-30-h-aist-ce-lab-third-open-forum.md(Kamigaki’s presentation; Hoshino’s framing; the panel quotations)sources/standards/2026-10-16-ce-association-social-implementation-cvp.pdf, p. 2 (the “data model standards for information on goods, including quality-related information” formulation)