Digital product passports are on the way. With regulations set to be approved in 2024, and implementation beginning as early as 2026, businesses will soon need to provide a digital product passport, for any product they want to sell in the EU. This new requirement aims to enhance consumer safety and improve traceability of goods throughout the European market.
Read on to find out how you can rise to the challenge that digital product passports present — creating opportunities for your business, delivering value to consumers, and ultimately helping to bring consumption within planetary and societal boundaries.
What is a digital product passport?
A digital product passport, or simply DPP, is a tool that holds any given product’s full life cycle data. It covers how the product is made, how it’s used, and what happens at the end of its life.
A Digital Product Passport is a tool that every consumer and business should embrace. It empowers consumers with vital product information, fostering transparency and trust. It supports businesses by streamlining supply chain management, opening doors to new markets. It also propels innovation by encouraging product designers to create more durable, upgradeable, and conscious products, aligning with a sustainable future.
– Bart Nollen, Dayrize Co-Founder
The digital product passport (DPP) will contain detailed information about the product’s origin, manufacturing process, and ingredients. Transparently sharing a product’s sustainability, environmental and recyclability attributes in this way is a crucial step on the journey towards a resource-efficient, circular economy.
Measuring social and planetary impact
The information that a digital product passport holds can help people and businesses accurately identify and assess a product’s impacts.
Measuring the social and planetary impact of products is a complicated process. In today’s globalised economy, tracing the lifespan of a single product involves interconnected supply chains and multiple suppliers all over the world.
Only when you have complete, transparent visibility into your supply chain can you identify issues and problems, and choose to make changes that address social injustices like forced labour and low wages, as well as mitigating planetary impacts like carbon emissions, pollution and waste.
Consumer benefits
For consumers, digital product passports are a ticket to a more sustainable and transparent world of shopping. DPPs provide detailed information about the environmental and social impact of products, allowing consumers to make informed choices.
Let’s say for example, that you’re trying to choose which of three t-shirts to buy. One of them says it’s “responsibly produced”, one is “made with sustainable fabric” and the other claims to be “environmentally friendly”. How do you know which one is “best”?
By comparing the three shirts’ digital product passports, you can see complete, transparent information about where each shirt was made, the materials it uses, how to repair it, and how to recycle it at the end of its useful life.
This makes it quick and easy to identify that one of the shirts scores much better in terms of labour conditions and end of life options, so that’s the one you buy.
Businesses that embrace digital product passports will gain an early competitive advantage that will only grow over time. By positioning their products as a verifiable, conscious choice, they can build consumer trust while also using data-based insights to continually improve their processes and products.
Business challenges
The opportunities are substantial, but digital product passports also present huge challenges for businesses. It can be hard to know where to start. It’s also hard to know how to start.
In order to get a complete picture of a product’s full impact, businesses need to extract transparent information about every step of every supply chain, including every other business partner involved.
You’ll need to get full access to primary data, to be compliant with regulations, to show progress to stakeholders and customers, and make sure you’re delivering on your corporate sustainability goals.
Reaching your sustainability destinations
As well as identifying opportunities for decoupling economic growth from resource extraction, waste streams and carbon emissions, digital product passports also help businesses make progress towards regulatory compliance, data maturity, and transparency.
Holistic analysis of the comprehensive data the digital product passports require can also provide valuable insights that businesses can use to improve products and reduce impacts. Whatever your specific goals, preparing your business for digital product passports requires a substantial investment of both time and money.
That’s where Dayrize comes in. Our industry-leading software combines the latest in sustainable science and technology to provide clear, actionable intelligence. Including this data in digital product passports is a cost-effective way to make concrete progress towards your sustainability destinations.
How Dayrize enables digital product passports
The global leader for rapid impact assessment of consumer products, Dayrize was established to make it easier for businesses and consumers to better understand impact, and bring consumption within planetary boundaries.
Our world-class team of environmental scientists, industrial ecologists and technology experts supports you throughout your journey, providing you with a data-driven, holistic and quantifiable roadmap.
We can provide accurate results even with limited primary data. Our intelligent software fills data gaps in your supply chain with accurate data from over 40 databases. We measure impact across five dimensions of sustainability, allowing us to accurately assess any consumer product, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
The intelligence and actionable insights we provide will help you quickly get started on your journey and significantly accelerate your progress towards your destination.
A closing thought
Digital product passports will soon be a fact of life. Businesses that act now will be better prepared to capitalise on the opportunities they present, building consumer trust in their products while making progress towards a more sustainable future.
In other words, working with Dayrize to automate your digital product passports for your business is a win for you, a win for consumers, and ultimately, a win for the planet.
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