What is a digital product passport? Carrying a product’s life-cycle data

An electric vehicle battery is being prepared for its second life. When you ask who made it, what materials it is made of, what carbon data it carries and what it has been through during use, the answers are scattered across different systems, e-mails and supplier files. Part of the information is not recorded anywhere. When the battery changes hands, its history starts to disappear, and the next user or recycler does not know the product in their hands well enough.

A digital product passport (DPP) is a digital record that links a physical product to its unique identity, supplier evidence, environmental data and life-cycle events, and presents this information through an access point such as a QR code so that authorised parties can see it within their own scope. In short, the passport takes the product’s “identity card” out of scattered files and turns it into a single record that lives with the product. In this article we explain what the passport carries, where the data comes from and who sees what.

Why is it so much on the agenda?

The questions of where products come from, what they are made with and what will happen at the end of their life are no longer just consumer curiosity; they are a shared need of manufacturers, suppliers, auditors and the recycling chain. For a product to be repaired, reused or recycled after correct separation, material and history information must be reachable in a reliable way. The passport takes this information out of scattered files and ties it to the product’s identity.

What does the passport carry?

• Unique identity: a permanent identity tied to the product or batch; the physical product reaches the digital record via QR.
• Material and environmental data: content, carbon and similar environmental indicators.
• Supplier evidence: which source and which document the data is based on; the declaration and the document are shown separately.
• Verification status: checking source, evidence, method and missing-data information before publication. Data gaps are not hidden; they are made visible.
• Life-cycle events: events running from production to recycling.
• Machine-readable output: structured data that systems can consume, alongside the screen that people read.

The same passport, different views

An important feature of the passport is that not everyone sees everything. From the same record, different and controlled data views are produced for the consumer, market surveillance and the recycler. For example, the consumer wants to see the product identity and usage-related information, the auditor the source and evidence status, and the recycler the material and dismantling information. Role-based access also prevents commercially sensitive information from reaching the wrong person. In this way the balance between transparency and data confidentiality is struck by opening to each stakeholder only the layer it needs.

Where does the data come from?

The passport does not produce data on its own; it brings together the information in a company’s different systems. That is why an intermediate integration layer is needed; the layer both collects the data and, before publication, makes missing or unevidenced fields visible. The typical classes of source systems are:

• ERP and MDM: product and commercial master data.
• PLM and PIM: design and product information.
• MES and QMS: production and quality records.
• LCA and PCF: life-cycle and product carbon footprint calculations.
• Supplier portal: supplier declarations and evidence documents.
• Product services: data coming from the product itself, such as a BMS in batteries.

A passport is not a PDF; it is a record that lives and is updated together with the product.

Life-cycle events

What sets the passport apart from a classic product label is that it can be updated throughout the product’s life. Events are kept tied to the original product identity:

1. Production: which line and which materials the product came from is recorded.
2. Placing on the market: the product going on sale and reaching its first owner is recorded.
3. Use: maintenance, repair or changing usage conditions are added; so the product’s history can be read from one place.
4. Second life: when the product moves to another use or a new owner, its identity is kept and the historical data is not lost.
5. Recycling: material information is ready for the recycler’s process, and how the product will be separated is not left to guesswork.

DÖNGÜ: the YazSis approach and its limits

YazSis’s DÖNGÜ work is a DPP operations centre designed to manage the digital product passport. It covers three stakeholder views, six source-system classes and two product scenarios, battery and textile; for textile, a production trace running from fibre source to distribution and a machine-readable passport output are shown. For the battery, the passport opened via QR brings together layers of identity, material, carbon, verification and role-based access. In other words, the aim is not only to show the data, but to show the source of the data and its gaps together.

You can look at how we could bring product life-cycle data together on the DÖNGÜ Digital Product Passport page.