Making Open Materials the New Default

As you all know having full knowledge about materials would be helpful to all of us developing hardware, yet it rarely available for anything. Consumer products have almost no information, but even things like 3D printing filament - the filament manufacturers DO NOT KNOW exactly what is in it (fillers, coloring agents, etc.) and worse I found that the pellet manufacturers rarely know either…To date this type of effort has been from the ground up with groups like Open Materials publishing their materials data on cool and innovative products. I think it would be far better if all material ingredient information was available for everything. I made the case for it in Materials Today. (OA if you cant read it)

The question I wanted to throw out to the group - is what steps do you think make the most sense for actually getting this to happen? (e.g. does it make more sense to target Europe first, etc.) Thanks - Joshua

Hi Joshua,

Very interesting and surprising ! Made me think of how we ended up with mandatory ingredients for food products…is that something you are thinking of too ? However this is B2C and I dont know if the same applies to B2B ? This is probably governed by contracts ?

Right now - most simply dont know - but yes it would be much better if it was exactly the same as food ingredients - but could be kept digital to avoid packaging mess.

Back in the day the Cradle2Cradle initiative made a similar effort, at least building an (open?) database of materials. Perhaps something can be learned from that?