Digital Product Passports and requirements for Manufacturers
Background: Climate demand
We all want to do our part in addressing the climate change crisis, to help mitigate its impact and secure a future for the generations to come. The challenge is, where do you start? The problem is vast and complex, making it easy to feel overwhelmed. If we look at the data from NASA over the past 20 years, it paints a rather grim picture.
NASA Climate Time Machine
There are two main topics that frequently come up when discussing solutions to climate change: the first is transitioning to green energy to power homes, factories, and cars, thereby reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. This step would get us halfway to our target of achieving net zero. However, the other half requires a shift in human behaviour towards a circular economy, where we reduce introduction of newly mined materials, reduce products going to waste and are instead repaired, recycled, or reused.
Achieving this circular economy ambition requires a system-level approach that encompasses everything from government policies to training the next generation of engineers in designing with circular economy principles in mind.
According to ISO59004 - Circular Economy Principles, these are the key principles for organisations to consider to move towards circular economy:
- System Thinking - Think in long term and across lifecycle of product
- Value Creation - Provide solution which improve social-economic and environmental value
- Value Sharing - collaborate and create value for your value chain for the benefit of society
- Resource Stewardship - responsible management of natural resources throughout the production and reduce virign material introduction
- Resource Traceability - collect and enable tracking of resources
- Ecosystem Resilience - develop and implement practices that protect and contribute to enviromental resilience
To encourage(nudge) organisations to adopt circular economy principles and to support consumers in making sustainable decisions, the European Union is proposing the use of Digital Product Passports (DPPs).
Currently, product packaging often lacks information on sustainability, repairability, and recycling. Even in the rare cases where this information is provided, accessing it in a user-friendly way is nearly impossible. This is where Digital Product Passports will change how we as consumers interact with products, how businesses operate sustainably, and how we all make more informed, sustainable choices.
What is Digital Product Passport and how will it help?
European Union (EU) is taking initiatives to enable circular economy and grow sustainable businesses by mandating the use of Digital Product Passports through its Ecodesign Regulation for Sustainable Products (ESPR). One of the first products to require a DPP by law are industrial batteries with capacity over 2KW.
The regulation includes the creation of a digital product passport to electronically register, process and share product-related information amongst supply chain businesses, authorities and consumers. This is expected to increase transparency, both for supply chain businesses and for the general public, and increase efficiencies in terms of information transfer. In particular, it is likely to help facilitate and streamline the monitoring and enforcement of the regulation carried out by EU and Member State authorities. It is also likely to provide a market-intelligence tool that may be used for revising and refining obligations in the future.
Through this regulation, consumers will be able to access product data via live links, such as QR codes, RFIDs, or NFC, and supply chains can use this data to optimise their operations. The goal of DPP is to empower consumers to make sustainable decisions, compare products more effectively, and support business models that reduce material waste sent to landfills.
The key features that ESPR aims to enable through the regulation are:
- Product durability and reliability;
- Product reusability;
- Product upgradability, reparability, maintenance and refurbishment;
- The presence of substances of concern in products;
- Product energy and resource efficiency;
- Recycled content in products;
- Product remanufacturing and recycling;
- Products’ carbon and environmental footprints;
- Products’ expected generation of waste materials.
Requirements for Manufacturing Industry
There are certain requirements for manufacturer which the regulation mandates to be included as part of DPP.
Manufacturers, their authorised representatives or importers to make parts of the technical documentation related to the relevant product digitally available to the Commission or market surveillance authorities without request. Products placed on the market to be able to measure the energy they consume or their performance in relation to other relevant product parameters(see above). Require the use of online tools to calculate the performance of a product in relation to a product parameter. For the purposes of compliance and verification of compliance with ecodesign requirements, tests, measurements and calculations shall be made using reliable, accurate and reproducible methods that take into account the generally recognised state-of-the art methods.
This should not be viewed as another regulatory compliance but as an opportunity to create a transparent, efficient, and sustainable value chain that benefits both the business and the environment. The regulation allows manufacturers worldwide to innovate in efficiencies, reduce non-value-added activities, and develop new business models, such as offering Product as a Service (PaaS).
What data needs to be in DPP?
The data model for a DPP that will cover every product is still under development. However, since the regulation requires DPPs to be interoperable, we can begin by examining the DPPs developed for the automotive sector. Key data categories include:
Key attributes:
- Passport metadata
- Product identification
- Product operation
- Product handling
- Product characteristic
- Sustainability information
- Materials information
- Commercial information
- Sources (documents)
- Additional data
How to get started?
As a manufacturer, you can start by mapping out the sources of data you currently share with customers through either paper or online methods. For example, product information might come from your design engineering team, while energy use and resource efficiency data might originate from your manufacturing operations. Information on repair, reuse, or spare parts would typically come from your supply chain or logistics operations. This activity would not only help you prepare for DPP deployment but as you go on this journey, help you identify business improvement opportunities.
Once you have mapped out the data sources, consider how you would like to integrate this data into a DPP. There are commercial DPP platforms available where you can manually upload data, generate a QR code, and place it on your products. Or develop internal platform to allow you to innovate faster and move closer to your customers.
In upcoming articles, I will explore how to build DPP system using open-source Python libraries. To get upcoming articles straight to your inbox, sign up to OpenManufacturing.Dev below.
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