Are you ready for Digital Product Passports?

Set to bring unprecedented sustainability information to supply chain buyers and end consumers

In today’s throw-away-and-buy-new culture, recycling, reusing, and repurposing has never been more in need of support. This is where Digital Product Passports come in.

Product Passports help towards responsible and informed consumption but first, let us look at what these passports are.

The European Union (EU) has set the ambitious target of becoming the first climate-neutral by 2050 with DPPs supporting this ambition.

The passports are digital records identifying each constituent part of a product. The information can include, for example, the amount of recycled material in it. Conversely, they can specify how at end of life, each part is capable of being repaired, recycled, down-cycled or re-used.

Passports could record manufacturing process, places of origin, and the types of transportation (and distance travelled) of parts, from source to the end user. This would enable all of us to determine every product’s carbon footprint, allowing one product to be compared with another on an honest and meaningful basis.

How Digital Product Passports will affect decision-making

Potential consumers can check the passports to see what materials were used to make the item and how it might have been built (using a process powered by renewable energy for example). Once they discover a product’s origin and, moreover, its carbon provenance, buyers can make informed decisions on whether to purchase a product.

In this way, we will all be able to base our decisions on the information provided. For example, passports could include the treatment, wages and safety of workers involved in making it; say too, the conditions of workers mining for minerals used in its production or the welfare of people working in the factories where they are made.? It is also possible for products to be evaluated on their sustainability in a circular economy, minimising waste and pollution.

Product passports would specify component materials which would enable a carbon-based? and sustainability library to be compiled. At this point, from clothes to buildings, fashion buyers to architects, would then be free to choose products, designs or buildings which are the most sustainable. If consumers voted with their feet, this would become a cycle of procurement where only the cleanest, greenest and most sustainable would survive.

A database of materials could also bring about a second-hand materials market and/or a bank of recovered materials available for re-use. Having a readily available inventory of valuable materials in a product, could make it more attractive to deconstruct at the end of its useful life, so that the rare or expensive elements can be re-used. Taking this idea further, if products were valued based on the cost and nature of their components, their intrinsic value would be recognised, and again, this information would encourage salvage and re-use. Their carbon footprint could be reduced too. Imagine a world where this was the norm; it may not be too far off.

The EU is close to enacting legislation requiring products to have a record of their composition and the environmental impact of their production under the Ecodesign Regulation. This is likely to boost consumer demand for sustainably produced goods, as well informing decisions made throughout the supply chain.

Batteries may be the first to be required to have a passport, but goods such as clothes could follow suit shortly afterwards.

Is your business ready for Digital Product Passports??

Businesses that are ahead of the curve and are already investing in low carbon production methods are going to benefit from being able to show their eco-credentials to end-consumers and B2B clients.

Decision-making using Digital Product Passports is destined to become the new normal - let OLYMPUS POWER LTD help you assess renewable energy sources for your business.