Scalable Sustainability with Condensed and Expanded Digital Product Passports

The European Commission has proposed the idea of digital product passports (DPPs) as part of its Green Deal, aiming to encourage businesses to adopt environmentally friendly practices. Essentially, a DPP is a digital document that keeps track of a product's entire journey—from being manufactured to eventually being recycled or disposed of. This kind of record helps make industries more transparent and efficient, supporting sustainable practices. DPPs use modern technology to collect and share information about products. The idea is gaining interest worldwide, with potential applications in many areas, such as consumer electronics, cars, healthcare products, and electric vehicle (EV) batteries. However, the standards for DPPs are still in development. Despite their promise, there are challenges like missing or duplicate data, constant updates, and differences in data formats, which can complicate the creation and use of DPPs. The SECONDPASS project is focused on addressing these issues by developing new ways to handle DPP data using Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal is to make the DPP system work smoothly on a large scale, allowing different industries and stakeholders around the world to efficiently track and share product information. Through SECONDPASS, the project aims to support the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: promoting decent work and economic growth (Goal 8), building resilient infrastructure and fostering innovation (Goal 9), creating sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11), ensuring responsible consumption and production (Goal 12), taking urgent action to combat climate change (Goal 13), and protecting life on land (Goal 15).

European Commission suggests implementing digital product passports (DPPs) as part of its Green Deal to promote circular business practices that reduce CO2 emissions and maximize material efficiency. DPP is a digital record providing comprehensive information about a product throughout its lifecycle, from manufacturing to disposal or recycling. DPP enhances transparency, traceability, and efficiency in various industries—contributing greatly to sustainable practices. DPPs leverage digital technologies to capture, manage, and share information on products throughout their lifecycles. We witness an increasing attention to create DPPs for a huge diversity of products at a global and large scale, from consumer electronics and automotive industry to healthcare products, and EV batteries. However, the concept of DPP and its standards are still in the early stages of development, while it has a great potential to be applied across various industries and scales of operation, i.e., achieving scalable sustainability. There exist a number of significant barriers to achieve this goal from the DPP data processing perspective, including missing data, duplication and dynamic updates, and lack of data standardization and interoperability. These are the main concerns in the journey of DPP from creation to representation and integration. The main focus of SECONDPASS is to address these concerns. We aim to research and develop data processing concepts and frameworks for DPP powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). These innovations will enable scalable sustainability on two complementary fronts: i) scalable DPP data processing and management, and ii) scalable DPP traceability and interoperability across various stakeholders on a global scale. In a global perspective, SECONDPASS project will contribute directly towards achieving the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 and 15.