While standardisation is a critical foundation for Digital Product Passports, the adoption of the DPP ultimately will determine its impact in practice. To explore what is needed for and currently hinders DPP adoption, we spoke with Carolynn Bernier (CIRPASS-2 Consortium Coordinator & Senior Research Engineer at Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, CEA) and Sjoerd Rongen (Digital Product Passports Lead at TNO and coordinator of the Centre of Excellence for Digital Product Passports).
Towards a circular economy with DPPs
A DPP is a structured collection of product-related, machine-readable data. Carolynn says: “It’s a tool to support sustainable product information sharing. On a deeper, fundamental level, it’s about sharing interoperable data to get to a circular economy. And this is completely new. Today, we share data in silos only. DPP is a cross-silo data interoperability solution. It’s a tool that can break open data silos. I don’t think this exists yet on a wide scale. The World Wide Web is used to share unstructured human-readable information. DPP is like the World Wide Web but for machine-readable structured data. Today, we are in a platform-based data economy where we rely on centralised platforms for data sharing. DPP is about the ‘deplatformisation’ of data sharing. This implies a switch from ‘I push my data someplace so I can share it with others’ to ‘I keep my data and those that need it can come and get it’. So I don’t have to deliver it to a data sharing platform and I keep sovereignty over my data.”
Pilots are crucial for DPP adoption
The CIRPASS-2 project is led by CEA-List, the Digital Institute of CEA, a French research organisation with a mission of innovation for industry. CIRPASS-2 is a three-year project that works on wide-scale piloting of DPPs in many different product categories (e.g. textiles, electrical and electronic equipment, tyres and construction value chains). By demonstrating functioning DPPs in real settings, CIRPASS-2 aims to prove that DPP can effectively promote economic and environmental sustainability. CIRPASS-2 specifically focuses on existing DPP ecosystems. By ‘ecosystem’, Carolynn means a DPP is issued by one partner and used by others. “Personally, I was very interested to work with existing ecosystems that were already convinced of the business value and opportunities of DPP before the idea of a European regulation came about. Now, they all have to ensure compliance to the regulation. In the CIRPASS-2 project, we want to accompany all pilot ecosystems on their journey towards compliance to regulations and common standards. It’s a very dynamic environment, because the standards are being written as we go.”
Carolynn continues: “There are more than four hundred DPP service providers registered in the CIRPASS-2 Community of Practice today. To keep the project manageable, only 13 are directly participating inCIRPASS-2. But we don’t just want to support these 13. We support a much wider DPP service provider community by communicating about our publications and our learnings. DPP service providers are fundamental to DPP adoption, because these companies help other companies to create value and achieve a circular economy.” Sjoerd underlines why this broader approach matters: “If you do this just for a few companies through a few pilots, its impact will be relatively minor. By incorporating a very large community and informing them, CIRPASS-2 not only helps them but also creates more value in the overall ecosystem.” Furthermore, the connection between CIRPASS-2 and CoE-DPP is clear. “CIRPASS-2 shows how DPPs can function in real life settings through various pilots. CoE-DPP supports DPP adoption by improving awareness and making existing expertise and tools, such as those developed in CIRPASS-2, accessible to companies in the larger Dutch DPP ecosystem.”
Interoperability as a prerequisite for scaling DPPs
Achieving interoperability through common standards is also crucial because all DPPs that exist today are not interoperable. This means you can’t scale and data can only be shared within small ecosystems. Carolynn says: “Now, every DPP service provider has their DPP solution. And as long as you remain within the ecosystem covered by that DPP service provider, you are fine. But you have zero interoperability with other ecosystems. That’s the big challenge we’re facing: making data more interoperable so it can be shared between ecosystems. This is a very hard concept to get across, because we’re not used to sharing data in open ecosystems. As I stated before, we are used to pushing our data onto platforms.
Carolynn continues: “The first half of the project was about getting to know one another, learning how to work with one another, building trust between all these competing ecosystems, and developing a common understanding of the DPP system architecture. TNO played a foundational role in creating the common theoretical understanding of for example building blocks and ontologies. Now, the second part of the project is very interesting because we’re actually building DPP system architectures. When you actually start implementing things, you run into real problems that need to be solved.”
The current status of DPP adoption
According to Carolynn, we are in the phase of early adoption. “There are hundreds of DPP service providers waiting to sell DPP solutions. So there are many early adopters, which is good and encouraging. If we can make the right design decisions and bring the cost down, then the DPP paradigm can thrive. We have to move away from ‘I have to deliver data to some place in order to share it’, so from a data-push approach, to a new way of sharing data based on data-pull. To make this work, industry has to understand what is needed to make data interoperable. This will change our thinking on how data can be shared. And that means that once this is understood in the industry, it will likely change the way data will be shared in the future. So our goal is to encourage the use of existing common standards and common protocols for sharing machine readable structured data and we relentlessly explain why this is important. So most people use Excel, right? And if you have no other option, Excel is great. But this is not the most efficient way to share machine readable structured data. If we succeed, this will have a huge impact in industry and the efficiency of data sharing.”
The biggest barriers for companies to adopt DPPs
According to Carolynn, the biggest barrier would be the international interoperability issues. “Usually, products are not made to be sold in one specific market. They’re made to be sold in many different markets. It’s hard enough trying to understand what you need to do when you sell products in Europe. But it’s going to be really difficult if you’re selling in multiple international markets that all have their own requirements, standards, and protocols you have to comply with.” She sees that many countries are working on DPPs and want to collaborate, exchange, and cooperate. “This is wonderful, but it’s also hugely challenging to organise global collaboration or alignment. An international dialogue needs to happen on standards and regulations.”
It’s also difficult for the very small companies who lack digitalisation. Furthermore, the obligations for those creating DPPs are pretty clear. However, roles for those who have to make sure that a DPP is available for the products they are handling (e.g. as an importer or as a retail or logistics company) aren’t clearly defined, and that is a big challenge. And how will market surveillance authorities interact with DPP? That’s a big unknown including how they will have to adapt their internal systems and what investments they will have to make.
Achieving (higher) DPP adoption
Carolynn thinks we have to communicate very clearly about the value of a specific DPP use case, both economically and environmentally. “We need to bring proof that the DPP solution generates value.” Sjoerd adds: “I agree, especially because measuring the value of sustainability challenges is incredibly difficult.” Carolynn ends with: “Right now, we are at a place of huge opportunity. If we do this right, if we make the right design decisions now, then this will have a huge impact on how we share data in five to thirty years. And it’s now that these design decisions need to be made properly.”
How does Sjoerd see the future of DPPs in five to ten years’ time? “In ten years, I expect we will have systems that enable far better tracking of products and we’ll be using this product related data for various value adding analysis, whether those be economic, ecological or otherwise. Chances are, in ten years, having a QR code on a product to provide this information is common and hardly noteworthy anymore. Though, as with any major system change, there will be sectors and value chains lagging behind that need more time to fully transition towards a sustainable, circular business model in which DPPs are commonplace.” His advice? Get started! “If you feel overwhelmed by all the technical aspects of the DPP, you can also start by gathering some of your primary supply chain partners and looking into how sharing product data, and using this for sustainability improvements, would impact your business. If you can find a business benefit enabled by DPPs, the technological part of it can be solved as well.”
Would you like more information about DPPs? Take a look at the presentations presented by experts during our DPP Festival on 9 October in The Hague or visit our knowledge base. Earlier, we also spoke with Jan Merckx and Sjoerd about Digital Product Passport (DPP) standardisation.
