Passports
"The Digital Product Passport is our North Star in the transition to a circular economy." (Ilias Iakovidis, DG Connect)
Product Passports are your licence for a circular world. They give you the information on what's in a product, how to use it, how to maintain, how to repair and how to recycle. March 2022 the EU introduced the proposal for Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). This new regulation specifies the Digital Product Passport. Final approval of the ESPR is expected April 2024.
The transition to a EU market with more sustainable products is an ambitious and resource intensive initiative. Therefor, the EU is prioritising based on the impact product groups will have on climate and materials. Textiles are considered as one of the priorities.
Timeline of the DPP implementation for textiles and shoes dd. January 2023.
Once the ESPR is approved, a delegated act for Textiles will be developed outlining the details to be considered (data and data system). Before, the technical standards for the data system will be created through a mandate given to CEN/CENELEC (due end of 2025).
The DPP should offer free access to data to actors along the entire value chain including customs authorities. This information must be based on open standards and inter-operable formats and be machine readable, searchable and structured.
For reference the most important paragraph of the ESPR considering the data system:
Article 10, par. (a): product Passports shall be fully interoperable with other product passports required by delegated acts adopted pursuant to Article 4 in relation to the technical, semantic and organisational aspects of end-to-end communication and data transfer.
The DPP should be easily accessible by scanning a data carrier, such as a watermark or a QR code.
The data carrier should be on the product itself to ensure the information remains accessible throughout its life cycle. However, the ESPR also states that the data carrier shall be physically present on the product, its packaging, or on documentation accompanying the product. To ensure interoperability, the types of permitted data carriers, the data carrier, the unique product identifier, and unique operator and facility identifiers will be standardized to guarantee compatibility with external components such as scanning devices.
Initiatives are ongoing to align with other continents of the globe.
It is now expected that DPP's will be mandatory for textiles made available on the EU market as of late 2027. The first mandatory DPP will be for batteries (see Battery regulation).
***
The CiLAB Collective has introduced a low cost, high value concept by 'upcycling' existing technologies. This means that we use available technologies without having the need to have deep expertise on information technologies.
We have based the passport on the GS1 Digital Link.
We believe that the willingness of providing the information is more important than the technologies used.
The link between the product and its digital twin is provided through a simple QR code using the GS1 Digital Link concept. The concept was introduced through a pilot project with Joseffa, Live Twice.
All Digital Product Passport data from the Joseffa 2022 collection is available through this link.
In case you like to have look, scan the QR-code and experience how easy product passports can be set up.
Any feedback? Tell us!
For the verification of the composition of each product we have used the portable hand-held scanner from Spectral Engines. This scanners analyse the fiber content of textiles using near infrared technology (NIR).
Video from Spectral Engines on the use of the mobile NIR scanner for analysing the textiles