Digitalisation in a Maritime Circular Economy

The increased strain on the earth’s resources may be mitigated by adopting the principles of the circular economy, particularly if these can be aligned with digital opportunities. The circular economy principles of redesigning the economic system to be restorative and regenerative are highly relevant to the maritime sector. A lot of the means used for sea transport and consequential port visits and cargo operations utilise physical infrastructures that both need to be utilised with high efficiency and should be reused as a whole or by its components in the secondary market. Reusing materials and securing high utilisation of physical infrastructures requires strong digital capabilities to underpin the circular economy business models, store the properties, and track the use of physical infrastructures and other maritime assets. In this chapter, a framework for a digital foundation that can support a maritime circular economy is introduced and exemplified by the circular material passport and the material pool. As the maritime industry increasingly captures the properties of used material for the ships, equipment, and infrastructures necessary to fulfil sea transport as part of digitalisation, the sector seems to have good opportunities to make the move towards a digitally supported competitive maritime circular economy that can both enhance and be guided by developments in maritime informatics.