Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains
[ 5 ][ 6 ]. This asymmetry shapes data-model maturity, vendor readiness, and SME pressure, and makes a single DPP playbook untenable.
The second observation is that, despite different sectors, both pilots converged on the same two pinch points: identifier resolution as the first technical bottleneck, and supplier IT capacity( especially below T1) as the first organisational bottleneck. These are the points where the European DPP architecture, federated, multi-issuer, multi-resolver, must succeed if it is to scale.
3 IMPLEMENTATION AND GOVERNANCE BARRIERS
We group the barriers our pilots encountered into three classes that mirror the structure of the recent literature on DPP supply-chain implementations [ 10 ][ 11 ][ 12 ]. Table 3-1 summarises how each barrier appeared and the mitigation adopted.
Barrier How it showed up in the pilots Mitigation adopted Anchor
Standard fragmentation |
Two consortia passports returned different valid recycled-content figures for the same battery |
Anchor on strongest legal model; treat others as twoway mappings |
[ 3 ][ 4 ] |
Semantic divergence |
Same label(“ recycled content”,“ country of origin”) carried different denominators / scopes |
Thin semantic translation layer( AAS submodel pattern) |
[ 10 ][ 13 ][ 1 4 ][ 15 ] |
Confidentiality vs. Sub-T1 suppliers withheld recipe and origin Signed VCs, tiered access, [ 9 ][ 16 ] transparency detail decentralized identifiers Table 3-1: Implementation barriers, their pilot manifestation, and the mitigations adopted.
3.1 STANDARD FRAGMENTATION
The DPP idea is a single regulatory instrument; the technical landscape underneath it is anything but. Battery passports built on Catena-X follow CX-0143 [ 3 ]. The GBA Battery Passport follows its own data taxonomy aligned to its Battery Benchmarks and Greenhouse Gas Rulebook [ 4 ]. CIRPASS-2 is producing a federated reference model across thirteen pilots [ 5 ]. Trace4Value has converged on 125 textile-specific data points with GS1 Sweden and the Swedish Institute for Standards [ 6 ]. Each standard is open, credible, and partially overlapping. None is, on its own, sufficient for a product whose supply chain crosses sectors; for example, an EV battery built into a vehicle whose interior textiles are also subject to DPP.
In the battery programme this collision was concrete: as reported in Section 2.1, the same module’ s recycled-cobalt figure produced different valid values under the GBA Battery Passport and CX-0143 respectively— neither passport wrong, but two technically valid documents disagreeing about the same physical battery.
10