Digital product passport: A big step towards a green circular economy?
Veracity Protocol is helping with the right implementation, making it more beneficial and reliable.
The standard of living across the globe has seen a rapid increase thanks to advancements in technology, improved access to education, and higher living standards. This has led to a significant surge in the consumption of products, which has escalated to record levels.
In the EU alone, for electrical and electronic products alone, people consume more than 20 kg of products per person, which is a staggering amount. This level of consumption puts a massive strain on natural resources, contributes to pollution and waste generation, and creates an unsustainable model of growth.
The consumption of products has escalated to record levels.
Despite this level of consumption, it is disheartening to know that many products are discarded even when they are still functional and could be useful to someone else. On March 30, 2022, the European Commission proposed a legislative package to make almost all physical goods in the EU more sustainable, circular, and energy-efficient throughout their life cycle to address this issue.
The legislative package includes various measures such as mandatory product standards, eco-design requirements, and labeling systems that provide information on product sustainability. Among the measures is the creation of a Digital Product Passport (DPP).
Imagine a digital passport that is easily accessible, secure, and shareable for every consumer product, from luxury goods to electronic devices. This passport would contain information about the provenance, product’s journey, sale, and recycling, all backed up by traceable and verifiable data.
It would create a tangible story about the item’s life cycle, reassure consumers of its origin, confirms its green credentials, and informs manufacturers how to create the next generation of greener and more efficient products. This innovative approach brings innumerable benefits that can drive progress toward a more sustainable future, promote circularity, and foster greater trust among consumers.
The digital product passport will keep products in circulation and reduce the extraction of new resources.
As consumers become more aware of their purchasing decisions’ impact on the environment and society, there is a growing demand for sustainable products. This has led to a call for transparency in supply chains, where consumers can trace a product’s journey from its raw material source to its disposal or recycling. It has become increasingly important for all actors involved in a product’s life cycle to collaborate and share information to ensure that sustainability is prioritized at every stage.
The DPP brings innumerable benefits that can drive progress toward a more sustainable future, promote circularity, and foster greater trust among consumers.
“Digital product passports are tools that can enable more efficient sharing of information across value chains,” said Stefan Sipka, a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre (EPC), a Brussels-based think-tank. “Products would have an ID number, similar to passports, and they should be machine-readable, either via QR codes or bar codes.”
In an interview with EURACTIV, he explained how “digital product passports can provide good opportunities for businesses. These tools can be used “to build closer relations with consumers,” as the traceability of a product’s environmental information should help create trust between the producer and consumers.”
The DPP can record a product’s lifecycle events into a transparent and unchangeable ledger by creating a digital twin of a physical item and connecting it to its digital representation. This can influence how the product is handled throughout its lifecycle. The digital product passport will keep products in circulation and reduce the extraction of new resources.
The DPP captures a wealth of information, including manufacturer data, ownership, duration of use, reuse, recycling, and more, ensuring a complete history of the product’s journey. Any development or change to a product is also recorded in the DPP, making it a valuable tool for manufacturers looking to promote more sustainable practices.
In addition, the DPP can incentivize sustainable actions by issuing tokens when a product is recycled. Stakeholders can verify circularity claims and promote transparency in the product’s lifecycle, promoting trust among consumers and driving progress toward a more eco-friendly future.
However, creating a digital twin of an item requires it to have a unique identification. Some products, particularly mass-produced ones, have identical barcodes in the database, making it challenging to trace them on an individual item level. Despite this challenge, the DPP remains a crucial enabler for businesses prioritizing sustainability, circularity, and transparency.
The most important thing is to choose the right technology and securely link physical objects to the digital.
Veracity Protocol helps implement DPP
If you decide to implement digital product passports, the most important thing is to choose the right technology and securely link physical objects to the digital. The link can be the weakest point in terms of security.
This aspect holds significant importance because even if the data within the passports is highly accurate, comprehensive, and trustworthy, it loses its purpose if there is no secure and reliable means of verifying that the physical product matches the information in the records or passport.
Fortunately for companies, an existing solution can already help brands link physical objects to the digital without needing external or embedded security elements. Veracity Protocol is the ideal technology to build DPPs and support the vision of secure transactions in a circular European economy.
Veracity Protocol serves as a trusted access point for your product passport initiatives. It guarantees the authentication and validation of the product’s identity, instilling the necessary confidence and trust to confirm its authenticity.
The picture above shows that there are three architectural layers of DPP. Much energy is spent around Scope and Data, but the weakest part is the Technology layer. This is where Veracity Protocol can help — it’s the ultimate, secure, and trustable data carrier.
Many companies use QR codes for product identification, which is convenient, as it can be easily scanned with a smartphone and offer consumers a way to identify products they purchased. But they lack security and can be easily removed from products, copied, or faked.
Veracity Protocol it the ultimate, secure, and trustable data carrier.
When designing a product passport system, it is crucial to emphasize the importance of considering the data carrier and data access point. These factors play a significant role in ensuring the integrity and reliability of the product identification process.
Veracity Protocol can add additional security to any external elements and work in tandem with them without impacting a production process, product design, or label supply chain and sourcing strategy. Layering both technologies provide companies with a highly accurate and quick identification and authentication system.
Why Veracity Protocol?
Imagine if you could pick up your phone, open an app, take a photo, and see all the details of an item’s identity, provenance, and history. With Veracity Protocol, this becomes a reality.
Our Computer Vision technology can create an immutable digital twin to any physical product. Brands can now rely solely on a product’s unique material structure — similar to a human fingerprint — which we call its Physical Codeᵀᴹ. This is easily done by taking a picture of the product with any camera during manufacturing, and the protection is instant.
Then, the product is immutably linked to its digital passport that can be integrated into supply chain systems or blockchain. This ensures that the digital record would only be connected to the original physical object and that counterfeits or duplicates would be detected 100% of the time.
Anyone in the supply chain can complete a verification anywhere, anytime. Our algorithm allows you to analyze the item’s unique material characteristics and get highly accurate verification results. Any consumer with a smartphone camera can know if the product is original or counterfeited. Unlike external security elements, our technology — the Physical Codeᵀᴹ — is impossible to reverse-engineer, tamper with, or duplicate.
Key advantages of VP’s technology:
- Immutable and Ultimate Security: One of the biggest advantages of VP technology is that it is immutable, meaning that once a product has been verified using it, it cannot be tampered with or altered. This makes VP an ultimate security solution, ensuring the product’s authenticity.
- Works with the item, packaging, and label as is: VP technology is designed to work with the item, packaging, and label as is, which means that there is no need to modify the product or packaging in any way. This makes the verification process quick, easy, and hassle-free.
- Highly Accurate Verification Results: VP technology is highly accurate, providing businesses with reliable and trustworthy verification results. This is achieved through the use of advanced algorithms and machine learning models that can detect even the most subtle differences between genuine and counterfeit products.
- Requires Only a Smartphone: VP technology is incredibly user-friendly and requires only a smartphone to operate. This makes it accessible to a wide range of businesses, regardless of their size or technical expertise.
- Environmentally Friendly and 100% Green Solution: VP technology is environmentally friendly and 100% green, as it does not require any additional hardware or materials to operate. This makes it an attractive solution for businesses looking for sustainable and eco-friendly options.
The DPP is a revolutionary solution that tackles critical industry challenges, including the lack of transparency, data reliability, and standardization. It is a powerful tool for achieving a sustainable future, driving energy and material efficiency, unlocking new business models, and enhancing consumer and manufacturer knowledge about a product’s life cycle.
If you are eager to explore the endless possibilities of DPP creation, we welcome you to contact us at hello@veracityprotocol.org. Our team is always prepared to discuss and collaborate with you to bring your vision to life.
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Veracity Protocol is an award-winning startup that builds a Vision AI Standard to protect people and products in the digital world. The standard guarantees the highest level of trust and security for verifying the identity, authenticity, and integrity of physical objects using a smartphone.
