Digital Product Passport

At a time when sustainability and environmental protection are becoming increasingly important, consumers and companies alike are looking for ways to reduce the environmental footprint of products. One promising concept that is gaining in importance in this context is the Digital Product Passport (DPP). This is intended to create more transparency about the origin, composition and disposal of products and thus facilitate the transition to a circular economy.

But what exactly is the digital product passport and how can blockchain technology help achieve its goals? In this blog post, we will take a closer look at these questions and also address current research results and practical examples.

The Digital Product Passport: key to enhance sustainability

The Digital Product Passport is a European Union concept that aims to create more transparency and traceability along the entire product life cycle. According to a report by the EUblockchain Observatory and Forum The DPP has three main objectives:

1. Improving transparency: The DPP is intended to give consumers and companies access to product-related information such as environmental performance, carbon balance and recyclability so that they can make informed decisions.
2. Promoting the circular economy: The DPP documents the entire product life cycle and thus supports repair, reuse and recycling.
3. Ensuring data security and privacy:The DPP promotes cybersecurity and data protection to ensure that digital products comply with EU standards.

In order to achieve these goals, the DPP will initially be introduced as mandatory for the textiles, EV batteries and construction products industries. Further product groups are to follow successively.

Blockchain as an enabler for the digital product passport

In order to successfully implement the digital product passport, a robust and trustworthy technology infrastructure is required. This is where blockchain technology comes in. The EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum report confirms several key benefits of using them in implementing the DPP:

· Decentralization and Disintermediation: Blockchain networks have no central point of control, which makes it difficult to manipulate data and creates trust between participants.

· Transparency and traceability: All transactions and product data are recorded transparently and unalterably in the blockchain network, which increases traceability along the supply chain.

· data security: Thanks to blockchain cryptographic mechanisms, the stored information is very difficult to falsify or delete, which ensures the protection of sensitive product data.

Practical examples of blockchain-based digital product passports

The report by the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum also presents several projects that are testing the use of blockchain for digital product passports:

1. ‍Trace4eu: This pilot project uses the EBSI blockchain infrastructure to ensure the traceability of products such as seafood, food, and batteries. Organizational identities (ODI) and verifiable credentials (VC, verifiable credentials) are used to enable transactions and document tracking across company boundaries.
2. BatteryPass: The consortium is developing a digital battery passport based on a private blockchain solution approved for participants. The aim is to create transparency and traceability along the battery value chain.
3. Re|Source: This initiative connects automotive manufacturers, mineral producers and recycling companies using a blockchain platform. This is intended to prove the origin and sustainability of battery raw materials.

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Conclusion

The Digital Product Passport is a promising concept to promote greater sustainability and a circular economy in the EU. Blockchain technology plays an important role in this by increasing transparency, security and trust in the product life cycle. It enables decentralized, transparent and secure recording of all product-relevant information without the barrier of local user administration, from the extraction of raw materials through supply chain and product life cycle to recycling.

At the same time, however, a number of technological and regulatory hurdles still need to be overcome before the DPP can be introduced across the board. Through a “Divide & Conquer” approach, various aspects are currently being developed in parallel and will be introduced industry-by-industry. For example, strives CIRPASS about developing a cross-sector data model including an exchange format for the DPP. Also interesting in this context is the EPCIS 2.0 web language of GS-1, which, for example, in the project TLIP is used for decentralized storage of supply chain events. This also makes it possible to attach sensor data to a decentralized DPP immediately after recording, in order to ensure, for example, an uninterrupted cold chain in a trustworthy manner.

Overall, it is clear that the digital product passport combined with blockchain technology has great potential to advance the circular economy in Europe and offer consumers and companies more transparency and sustainability in products. In pilot projects, the W3C DID specification and the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) from the IOTA Foundation are used. With its DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) structure, the latter offers advantages over conventional blockchains for use in DPP projects, in particular in terms of transaction costs, speed and scalability.

What else?

Find out how the digital product passport can also be used in conjunction with blockchain technology and trustworthy physical anchors, e.g. for

• Trademark protection
• Branding
• Supply chain optimization
• Access to secondary market
• Establishment and maintenance of Customer communities
• Creation of Zero-party data
• customer loyalty