Are You Ready for Digital Product Passports?

The unprecedented number of manufacturer liability legislations greenlit across Europe recently showcases a new level of environmental awareness at the highest level.

The European Digital Product Passport (DPP) initiative comes under the European Green Deal, first approved in 2020, which aims to achieve sustainable growth so that Europe becomes the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.

What is a Digital Product Passport? 

Digital product passports (DPP) aim to gather data on a product and its supply chain and share it across entire value chains so all actors, manufacturers, repairers, and consumers better understand the environmental impact of the materials and products they use.

Information like a unique identifier, material data, sustainability, and repair data will have to be shared, in addition to the basic but still mandatory product name, product model, manufacturing place and date, and warranty details. 

The implementation of DPP in these value chains is designed to support the following:

• • Compliance with legal regulations: the DPP will be a record of the standards a product complies with and provides transparency to business partners. 
  • Sustainable production: encouraging circular economy, boosting material and energy efficiency, extending product lifetimes, and optimizing product (re)use. 
    • Circular economy: Markets that give incentives for reusing products

• • New business model creation: more businesses can implement service and repair-based business models.
  • Impact on purchasing decisions: consumers will be aware of the total impact of their buying behaviors and better equipped to make purchase decisions.

Who’s Impacted by DPP Regulation? 

The DPP project was unveiled by the EU on March 30, 2022, within a broader package designed to make sustainable products the norm in Europe. Access to DPP data is expected to be made mandatory by 2026.

Even if this DPP is a European initiative, this is expected to impact value chains globally, given that all products placed on the EU market will be affected. 

If a fashion manufacturer headquartered in the US produces in Asia, and sells in some European countries, it must provide DPP for all its products.

As far as industries are concerned, battery industries will be the first to comply with all relevant DPP expectations.

Other digital product passport requirements for specific industries will be rolled out. These will be based on targeted product categories that align with the EU Circular Economy Action Plan.

Here are the first concerned industries: 

• Battery
• Textiles
• Construction
• Electronics
• Plastics
• Chemicals
• Automotive

Legislation is set to connect these different product categories as part of the increasing push for digitization, connected data sets, and environmental impact assessment across product lifecycles.

How Akeneo Can Help Your Organization Prepare

The expected format of this DPP is still unknown, however, the more prepared you can be with product information, the faster your organization will adapt and comply.

This is exactly what Akeneo can bring to your organization: a scalable source of truth for your product information adapted to your business needs. 

And technology is not the only component to ensure you are ready with your product data: an omnichannel product experience (PX) strategy is required to take that product information and ensure that it reaches the right audiences, at the right time, in the right place. 

The benefit of uniting composable technology and a PX strategy is that not only are you creating a ready-to-use source of truth for all your products, but it also provides your team with the scalability needed to address any new requirements from a marketplace or legal initiative, or even a future evolution of something like DPP.

With Akeneo as your backbone, your team will be able to:

• Organize the required information within Akeneo PIM thanks to a dedicated attribute group (gathering all the DPP related information for instance) or a table attribute. 
• Export the information you need precisely in the right format and the right language, thanks to the native feature Tailored Export to prepare all the required information to generate a compelling product detail page. 
• Turn this extracted information into a specific format (as soon as we know the DPP format) thanks to our custom apps or some dedicated App that will be built by actors in the blockchain-based QR codes area – exactly as it already exists for the GS1 standard.

Passports shall be designed and operated to ensure security and privacy. Data authentication, reliability, and integrity shall be ensured.

Being an early adopter, even moving ahead of the DPP regulations, can mitigate risks and unlock growth opportunities. The earlier you’ll be ready, the bigger will be your growth.

Want to see how Akeneo can help your team prepare to meet the legal requirements of DPP? Reach out to an Akeneo expert today.