Achieving a Sustainable Economy with Digital Product Passports
• Be issued by a recognized authority .
• Reference product characteristics following agreed standards .
• Be based on validated source information without revealing all internal product details to competitors .
• Support the onward composition of products in a supply chain to form new products with their own product passport . The product passports must form a “ product passport supply chain .”
• Be generated and managed with a minimum of manual interactions .
The fulfillment of these requirements is essential to implement efficient and sustainable product passports in a business ecosystem and thus achieve sustainability of the real supply chain and enable its monitoring . The supply chain participants need to be able to rely on each other and adapt to changing market needs . The proposed EU regulation ‘ Ecodesign for sustainable products ’ [ 7 ] also foresees introducing DPPs .
DPPs integrated into a cross-sector ecosystem can be an important source of trustworthy information for product- and company-related sustainability information . Sustainability information provides the basis for sustainability assessments of products , suppliers , and entire supply chains . A holistic approach includes legal , environmental , social and economic aspects . A circular economy aims to maximize the reuse and regeneration of materials and products in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way . A DPP is a fundamental enabler to achieve this aim as it holds all essential product information needed to inform product purchasers , as well as facilitating repairs and recycling .
This document aims to inform and provide guidance on the implementation and management of Digital Product Passports in a supply chain network aiming to achieve a sustainable economy .
The document describes a conceptual approach to implementing Digital Product Passports within an extension of the Smart Factory Web architecture where sustainability data plays a central role . The Smart Factory Web Capability Model , the Supplier Knowledge Base and the Sustainability AI are core components in this extended architecture . The approach for two use cases is presented in Chapter 5 .
• Chapter 2 – Motivation
• Chapter 3 – Previous Work and State of the Art
• Chapter 4 – Conceptual Approach and Implementation
• Chapter 5 – Use Case Validation and Applicability
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