A DPP is a digital product passport
Digital Product Passport, a digital doppelganger of a physical product, collects data throughout its life cycle.
Digital Product Passports provide detailed data on the sustainability impact of each stage of a product’s life, from raw materials to manufacturing and distribution to disposal or recycling.
Consider Digital Product Passports an all-access pass to your product chain. Each passport is tied to a product via a barcode, QR, or NFC tag that can be scanned on a phone or similar device for real-time information.
Consider purchasing a cotton t-shirt with a QR code on the care tag. By scanning the code with your phone, you can quickly learn about the cotton’s origin, sustainability effect, production, and how to recycle it.
The dynamic nature of a Digital Product Passport is intriguing. The profile changes with the product during its life cycle. T-shirt repairs and recycling will be recorded in the passport. Therefore, Digital Product Passports are always accurate, current, and reliable.
The ‘economic operator,’ or product seller, generates these passports. This is usually the final product maker, brand, or retailer (for private label items).
Digital Product Passports enable firms to comply with legislation, create more sustainable goods, and accelerate the circular economy by providing transparency. They provide customers the knowledge they need to make responsible decisions, putting them in charge of sustainability. We’ll discuss these advantages later in the article.
Why are digital product passports important?
Over two billion tons of trash are generated annually, with most going to landfills or incinerators. We must rethink product production, use, and disposal to address this. Make the switch from linear to circular economy.
However, circularity is difficult without specific data on product life cycle effects or supplier networks. Digital Product Passports reveal your product’s travel and environmental effect. Thus, Digital Product Passports are essential for the circular economy shift.
Digital Product Passports are crucial to the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP), which is transforming Europe’s economy. This strategy mandates that your organization offer precise product sustainability data, which Digital Product Passports can deliver. In summary, Digital Product Passports help your firm comply with existing and future requirements, which we’ll discuss further in this article.
But Digital Product Passports are about trust, not simply compliance. Consumers increasingly choose companies based on sustainability transparency. Digital Product Passports help your organization avoid greenwashing and strengthen client connections by verifying sustainability claims.
Digital Product Passport prerequisites
Digital Product Passports record product path, composition, and effect. The passport is built on these aspects to show your product’s life cycle.
This data is meant to be shared across the supply chain, so everyone can learn about the product’s journey.
The main information in Digital Product Passports is below:
- Product name, batch, model, and unique identifiers like barcodes or QR codes are included.
- Material data: Quantity, origin, and properties of your product’s materials, including raw material sources and suppliers.
- Environmental sustainability data: Resource usage, energy consumption, and carbon emissions throughout your product’s life cycle.
- SoCs: Your product’s chemicals and hazards.
- Use data: Product use, maintenance, and repair history.
Information for reusing, recycling, or disposing of your goods with little environmental effect.
Other criteria include having the unique identification (e.g., QR code) on your goods, packaging, or documentation. The information in your product’s passport must be organized, machine-readable, and searchable. Blockchain technology meets these standards and makes Digital Product Passport data visible and tamper-proof, giving safe and trustworthy information.
EU Digital Product Passport rules
Companies seldom considered product sustainability until recently. However, new restrictions make it impossible to ignore your goods’ environmental effect.
Europe is leading the way with its Circular Economy Action Plan, encouraging businesses to use Digital Product Passports for transparency and sustainability.
The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) demands Digital Product Passports for compliance, making it important. This distinction is crucial since other rules encourage, rather than compel, Digital Product Passports to collect data for compliance. Companies subject to this legislation must produce Digital Product Passports.
Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and Digital Product Passports
Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) is a major step toward Europe’s circular economy. It expands the Ecodesign Directive beyond energy-intensive items and requires product eco-design. The aim? Make items more circular and sustainable by making them durable, repairable, reusable, and recyclable. This gradual legislation will change European product design, manufacturing, and marketing.
This legislation requires digital product passports. These passports assist organizations achieve eco-design criteria by collecting and reporting environmental data throughout a product’s life cycle. Companies without Digital Product Passports will struggle to comply.
Due to its environmental effect and circularity potential, ESPR first targets batteries, textiles, and electronics. The following industries require Digital Product Passports by 2026. After building, packaging, furniture, chemical, and telecommunications will follow. ESPR and Digital Product Passports will cover 30 product categories.
Initial enterprises are in a hurry. Companies in these sectors should prioritize data collection, system setup, and ESPR compliance. Post-2026 industries should act now! Digital Product Passports need early planning to remain ahead and ensure a seamless transition.
Digital Product Passports: What impact on industries?
As indicated, the ESPR legislation first targets batteries, textiles, and electronics. These sectors will require Digital Product Passports initially.
Let’s examine how Digital Product Passports will support these businesses.
Fashion
An amazing 92 million tons of textile waste is produced each year, and it’s predicted to expand. Fashion generates a lot of textile waste. Digital Product Passports will give transparency as consumers become more conscious of the sector’s environmental effect, greenwashing, and confusing supply networks. Digital Product Passports will assist fashion firms comply with the EU’s Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles and the ESPR law by providing full product life cycle data. The data will also speed textile environmental activities.
Batteries
Batteries, which are crucial to the EU’s electric vehicle and sustainable energy transition, pose environmental issues throughout their lifespan. With the battery business anticipated to develop fast, limiting their effect is crucial. Companies need Digital Product Passports to fulfill EU Battery Regulation and ESPR regulations. These passports’ data will also drive circularity efforts like the EU Battery Regulation’s emphasis on energy storage for electric vehicle batteries.
Electronics
World’s fastest-growing waste source, e-waste, remains a problem. Digital Product Passports in electronics are required by the ESPR to increase openness about composition, repairability, and recyclability. Digital Product Passports will increase transparency, minimize e-waste, and prolong gadgets’ lifetime.
Digital Product Passport Benefits
Digital Product Passports provide accurate, transparent data about your product’s entire life.
This openness gives your firm several advantages, including:
Data-driven strategies: Digital Product Passports give environmental data on materials and processes throughout the product life cycle. Build data-driven plans to assess and minimize your product’s environmental effect using this data.
Digital Product Passports’ end-of-life data allows your organization to grow circular business models and enhance product design for circularity.
Real-time data on your product’s supply networks optimises procedures to decrease environmental impact and increase efficiency.
Regulatory compliance: Digital Passports give data for regulatory compliance and corporate futureproofing.
Market differentiation: Early adopters of Digital Product Passports may demonstrate their sustainability commitment and transparency. Digital Product Passports may authenticate your sustainability actions and promote consumer loyalty because 46% of customers seek product origin information. However, Digital Product Passports alter the game for consumers as well as businesses:
Consumer empowerment: Digital Product Passports allow customers to make sustainable, informed decisions. Customers may now easily support sustainable products with clear, certified environmental effect information.
Avoid greenwashing: Digital Product Passports provide buyers the data they need to validate firms’ sustainability promises.
Challenges of Digital Product Passports
Despite their advantages, Digital Product Passports have drawbacks. Data collecting is a major challenge for global supply chain firms. Data collection from every supplier may be resource-intensive, particularly for smaller organizations.
Your firm may also have IP issues. Sharing comprehensive product information may disclose sensitive data. Your company must combine transparency and IP protection.
Standardization and integration are additional issues. Digital Product Passport systems may be difficult to integrate with your business operations, and achieving data standards across sectors and countries needs cooperation.
Despite these hurdles, know that your industry faces similar concerns. Therefore, industry-wide cooperation is essential for digital product passport adoption.
Introduction to Digital Product Passports
Where should organizations start generating Digital Product Passports? Key steps to get started:
Data mapping: Create a framework for the Digital Product Passport’s product origin, materials, environmental effect and end-of-life data.
Cooperate throughout the value chain: Work with suppliers, manufacturers, and logistics partners to acquire accurate and consistent data. Make sure your value chain members know their roles and data collection requirements.
Add passports to your items using data carrier technologies like QR codes for unique producer identification. Implement digital infrastructure for real-time updates, safe data exchange and uniform data gathering.
Small-scale pilots should test the Digital Product Passport implementation. Use these findings to improve your strategy and expand across product lines and supplier networks.
Digital Product Passport software
Technology is essential to developing Digital Product Passports. Blockchain can securely store the whole lifecycle of your product, from raw ingredients to end-of-life, assuring transparency. Blockchain is essential to Digital Product Passports because it secures and tracks product data throughout its life cycle.
Advanced QR codes and NFC tags are also changing passport attachment to items. They ease product data access and update.
Organizations must use these technologies to remain ahead of laws and assure dependable and compliant Digital Product Passports.
