Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains
mineral origin and a downstream recycler( T3), with roughly fourteen suppliers in scope. Table 2- 1 summarises both pilots side by side.
Additional observations were drawn from the Horizon Europe BASE project, which brings together 19 institutions( 15 beneficiaries and 4 associated partners) across the battery value chain, including battery manufacturers, OEMs, marine energy providers, recyclers, and technology developers. At the time of writing, BASE had completed its first reporting period, delivering the foundational dataspace architecture, semantic data models, Digital Battery Passport framework, ESG indicator methodology, and interoperability specifications required to support battery passport deployment at scale.
The data model was anchored on the Catena-X CX-0143 Digital Product Passport standard [ 3 ], expressed as Asset Administration Shell submodels [ 15 ], and mapped two-way to the GBA Battery Passport schema [ 4 ] so the same battery could be presented into either ecosystem. Integration touchpoints were the OEM’ s ERP and a PLM on the manufacturing side, and the recycler’ s batch-tracking MES at end-of-life. Supplier data was exchanged as signed credentials rather than raw records, consistent with the federated pattern in Section 5.
Three outcomes are reported. First, data quality: completeness of the regulated CX-0143 attribute set rose from about 55 % to about 88 % of mandatory fields populated and sourcevalidated over the pilot( Figure 2-1). Second, onboarding time: a T1 supplier with an existing API reached production data exchange in roughly ten working days, whereas T2 / T3 actors without middleware took six to eight weeks( Figure 2-2). Third, coverage: roughly 70 % of the bill-ofmaterials mass for the regulated materials was traceable to a verified origin claim by pilot end, with the residual gap concentrated below T2. Mass was used as the traceability metric because the EU Battery Regulation ' s recycled-content obligations are expressed in weight percentages; a cost- or criticality-weighted measure would give a different picture— cobalt, for instance, represents a small fraction of module mass but a disproportionate share of value and regulatory risk— and developing such an index is a direction the pilot recommends for future work.
The pilot surfaced one gap the literature under-treats: the“ recycled-content boundary” mismatch. CX-0143, the GBA Battery Passport, and the EU Battery Regulation each define recycled content slightly differently( pre-consumer vs. post-consumer inclusion, mass-balance vs. physical allocation), so a single battery yielded different valid recycled-content figures depending on which schema rendered it: a mapping problem invisible until two consortia’ s passports were placed side by side.
EDM Association – Journal of Innovation 7