PhD Studentship: The business case for battery traceability: exploring product passports and circular value creation

Aims and Research Question

This project will explore the business case for battery traceability through digital product passports. As global demand for energy storage accelerates, tracking materials and components across a battery’s life cycle is becoming a regulatory requirement and strategic opportunity. However, the business model for traceability solutions remains untested. This project will examine how battery traceability can create value beyond compliance by enabling product life extension, second-life applications, and circular business models.

Background and rationale

Batteries are critical for decarbonising industry and mobility through electrification. However, the environmental, social, and geopolitical challenges associated with their production and disposal are significant. Critical material supply chains are concentrated in a few regions, creating dependencies and risks for global production systems. With the EU Battery Regulation (2023), digital product passports have emerged as a mechanism to ensure transparency, accountability, and resource efficiency throughout the battery value chain. These passports store and share verifiable information on a product’s origin, composition, use, and condition to support sustainable production, reuse, and recycling (Pohlmann et al. 2025).

While regulation increasingly mandates sharing verifiable information, the business rationale for implementing traceability systems remains contested as it involves investment in costly traceability technologies, organisational change and new partnerships and collaborations. Yet, early adopters may gain strategic advantages such as discovering new value-creation opportunities.

This project will be conducted in collaboration with Circularise, a technology company founded in 2016 that develops blockchain-based digital product passport solutions. Circularise works with firms across sectors, including battery and energy storage, to enable secure and decentralised data exchange. This collaboration provides the student with direct access to a pioneering firm at the forefront of product traceability, along with its network of industrial partners.

Qualifications and skills required

Applicants must have a 1^st or good 2:1 degree, preferably in a related social science discipline, and must hold a relevant master’s degree, that included a dissertation module.

Applicants will also be required to demonstrate some applied knowledge of qualitative research methodologies, including qualitative interviewing, ethnography, and document analysis. However, when joining the KBS PhD programme the student will receive support and training in both qualitative and quantitative research methods as part of the PhD.

Further information

You can email Professor Jonatan Pinkse (jonatan.pinkse@kcl.ac.uk) for an informal discussion about this studentship.

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