Are dataloggers the chewing gum of logistics?

Chewing gum, disposable vapes, fake snow, bread bag clips, ice cream sticks: the Netherlands is pushing in Brussels for tougher European rules on single-use plastics. Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant revealed this last Monday, based on documents sent to the House of Representatives.

The government is taking aim at products that are used briefly, linger for years and leave the clean-up costs to someone else. And rightly so. According to the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, these products damage the environment, are costly to clean up and contribute to the growing problem of microplastics.

But while politicians debate a 0.5-gram plastic bread clip, a similar but far less visible scenario is playing out across global logistics. Every day, millions of small electronic devices travel with temperature-sensitive shipments, only to end up as waste. Dataloggers: they may not stick to your shoe, but they still leave a serious footprint. In short, the chewing gum of the modern supply chain.

The anatomy of a hidden problem

If you do not work in logistics or pharma, chances are you have never really thought about them. But for temperature-controlled transport of medicines, vaccines, fruit and flowers, dataloggers are essential. These small devices measure temperature and humidity during transit to prove that the cargo has remained safe.

Once the shipment arrives, the plastic logger is read out and thrown away. Every year, more than 80 million plastic dataloggers are discarded worldwide. And unlike chewing gum or a bread clip, we are not talking about a simple piece of polymer.

A traditional datalogger is basically a miniature computer:

• A hard, non-degradable plastic casing.
• A circuit board full of chips and heavy metals.
• A lithium battery that leaves behind chemical waste.

It is an uncomfortable paradox: the technology designed to prevent waste becomes waste itself.

The lobby playbook: ‘Too expensive, too complex’

One of the most fascinating parts of the chewing gum debate in the Volkskrant is the defence line of the traditional industry. The arguments used by chewing gum producers to protect their plastic gum base could easily be borrowed by traditional hardware manufacturers in logistics.

Switching to natural alternatives would be too expensive and too complex. Sustainable options would never meet the required scale and volumes. And the real problem, they say, lies with the user. After all, people could simply dispose of that piece of chewing gum, or that datalogger, in the right way.

But that avoids the fundamental questions: why do we use complex electronic devices for a function that often lasts only one journey? And why do we still accept a form of disposability in professional supply chains that we are increasingly questioning in consumer markets?

Legislation is catching up

Companies that believe they can keep dodging the e-waste dance are still in denial. Over the past few years, legislation has gained serious momentum.

Legally, dataloggers do not sit in the same box as chewing gum, plastic straws or bread clips. They are not classic litter items. They do not wash up on beaches in large numbers, and they are not visible in our streets. The European debate on single-use plastics mainly focuses on products that visibly end up in the environment.

For electronic dataloggers, a different framework is more relevant: the rules on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, or WEEE. Producers that place electronics on the market have strict responsibilities around collection, processing, financing and reporting. In other words: the law already recognises that these products become waste.

But that does not solve the problem at the front end. Much of the regulation focuses on what happens after a device has already been discarded. How do we collect it? Who pays for processing? How do we report how much is placed on the market and how much is recycled?

Important questions. But they do not challenge the habit itself: why are we still designing electronic products that become waste after a single trip?

And there is a second shift underway. Through European sustainability reporting, including CSRD, supply chain impact is becoming increasingly visible. Large companies must report on relevant impacts, risks and opportunities across their value chain. Waste, circularity and material use are becoming harder to dismiss as something that happens “somewhere else” or through a supply chain partner.

Reliable data remains essential for medicines, flowers, bulbs, food and fresh produce. But that is exactly why we need to question the design choice more sharply. If a product is designed to travel temporarily through a logistics chain, the first sustainability question should not be how we process it afterwards. The first question should be: why does temporary monitoring so often still mean temporary electronics?

In other words: the law regulates the waste. But who questions the habit?

This is how it can be done

Tapp shows that there is another way. By stripping the traditional datalogger back to its essence, the shift from plastic and lithium to paper and ink becomes reality.

• Paper made from agricultural waste, developed with PaperWise: no trees cut down and recyclable in the existing paper stream.
• Printed electronics: conductive ink that generates its own energy, so no lithium battery is needed.
• 90% less e-waste: only the ultra-thin microchip remains, which is filtered out during paper processing just like a paperclip.

The tipping point is now

It is easy to point at chewing gum on the pavement or a plastic bread clip in the bin. That is visible pollution. You see it. You get annoyed by it. Someone has to clean it up.

But the biggest waste streams are not always the most visible.

Of course, we can wait for legislation to deliver the final push. We can wait until single-use electronics carry the same political weight as plastic straws, disposable vapes and chewing gum. But a future-proof supply chain starts earlier. At the design stage, in procurement and in taking responsibility before waste is created in the first place.

Because if we no longer accept plastic chewing gum on our streets, why would we keep accepting plastic disposable electronics in logistics?