Your passport, please

Product and material passports are only useful for the circular economy if they are “actually robustly linked to products and materials,” conclude two researchers who have looked into that aspect of the proposed European Green Deal.

A research team that included Georg Dost, Dr. Beate Kummer, Dr. Maziar Matloubi, Jochen Moesslein and Amy Treick. Kummer has worked on several recycling-related issues in previous research projects.

Regarding a Digital Product Passport (DPP) proposed as part of the EcoDesign Directive in Europe, the researchers say “there should be a central place that contains all information about the product.”

Continue the report’s authors, “This includes, for example, information on the origin, composition, environmental data, repair and disassembly options as well as the handling at the end of a product’s life.”

A DPP with those qualities could be accomplished with “a central database that users can access,” they suggest. “In this way, the DPP creates the basis for uniform and transparent product information, and contributes to the promotion of an environmentally sound circular economy - from the sustainable extraction of raw materials and the support of conscious purchasing decisions by consumers to professional recycling.”

The researchers also see ways to improve the European green building sector’s  Digital Material Passport (DMP). “In the building sector, deconstruction or demolition processes are currently rarely associated with the extraction of raw materials, but rather with the challenges of disposal. To change this, detailed information about the products, components and materials used in the building must be available,” the write.

Such changes, say the scholars, can benefit not only recyclers but the wider effort to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. “Currently, half of total GHGs and over 90 percent of biodiversity loss and water scarcity are due to resource extraction and processing,” they state.

“At the same time, global consumption of materials such as biomass, fossil fuels, metals and minerals is expected to double over the next four decades, and annual waste generation is expected to increase by 70 percent by 2050,” they continue. “In this context, it is of central relevance to massively reduce the excessive consumption of goods and the resulting waste and to establish a true circular economy with sustainable, durable, repairable and recyclable products.”

Kummer and his co-authors say the DPP and DMP “are a necessary instrument in this regard, [but they] should now also be implemented in concrete terms, e.g. within the framework of extended producer responsibility (EPR) [and] should contain relevant information on the origin, production or environmentally sound handling of products or materials, so that they can be reused by actors along the entire life cycle and recycled in a high-quality manner.”