How and why Digital Product Passports drives sustainability
The road to a circular economy includes several EU regulations, driving digitalization and sustainability. One of the most interesting legislative tools that will have a profound impact on all product design and engineering is the upcoming Digital Product Passport, DPP. Anyone putting a product on the European market will be hit–including subcontractors.
The Digital Product Passport, DPP, is part of the EU Ecodesign directive, or ESPR, which in turn is a part of the EU Green Deal. In this large context, the Digital Product Passport is a tool that will drive towards more sustainable production and consumption.
The DPP will be a digital representation of a physical product, i.e. a kind of digital twin. It will comprise a set of digital data that is specific to a product and aims to make visible all relevant information about the product during its lifecycle. The passports will relate to sustainability, circularity, value retention for reuse, re-manufacturing, and recycling.
The data will be made available for the consumer via a QR code, a barcode or some other identifier, typically accessed by a smartphone or other device. This way, the consumer can scan the identifier and get all kinds of information about the product: warranties, how to dispose it, all raw materials it contains and where they come from, the carbon footprint and much more.
Five goals of the Digital Product Passport
By implementing digital product passports, the EU has five goals:
- Enhancing sustainable production.
- Extending product lifetimes, optimizing product use, and providing new business opportunities to economic actors through circular value retention and extraction.
- Supporting consumers in making sustainable choices.
- Enabling the transition to a circular economy by boosting materials and energy efficiency.
- Supporting authorities to verify compliance.
Why you must gain control over your raw materials
The big thing here that will affect all industries is that the company putting the product on the EU market is responsible for the DPP data. This means that you must gain full control over your raw materials–and offer full transparency towards the end consumers or your industry customers, if you are a subcontractor.
A clue to what will apply
The DPP is still a new legislation. The first out to live up to its requirements are batteries, as the digital product passport for batteries was approved by the European Parliament and Council in December 2022. Textiles, electronics, furniture, construction materials, toys, packages, and other product categories will follow successively until around 2030, although it is not yet clear how the DPP:s will be designed. But looking at the information categories from the battery passport, it gives us a good clue to what will apply. The information covers:
- General information on the product and its performance and durability.
- Physical attributes, materials and compositions.
- Supply chain due diligence.
- Labels, certifications and declarations.
- Environmental information such as carbon footprint.
- Product and materials circularity and efficiency.
Digital product passports go beyond recycling
Digital product passports aim to encourage companies to produce more sustainable products for a circular economy. And this is not just about recycling. Yes, it is important to know whether the product is recyclable. But we must look at other levels as well:
- Reselling/reusing.
- Repairing.
- Refurbishing.
- Disassembling and reuse parts.
Information about the source of the materials and all data connected to the materials in your products will therefore be crucial in a near future. Without that, you won’t be able to produce the data for the DPP, covering all aspects of circularity. This will be important, not only for complying with the DPP.
In order to achieve this comprehensive understanding and management of product materials, companies need to adopt advanced tools and platforms. These tools help in gathering, analyzing, and utilizing data effectively. This is where material intelligence platforms come into play.
What are the practical actions one can take now for the Digital Product Passport?
Designing for a circular economy requires that the engineers get information about all parts and raw materials and how these fit in a design for circularity:
- How the products are supposed to be reused.
- What parts or assemblies are supposed to live through several circles of usage.
- Which parts or assemblies are supposed to be recycled.
- The carbon footprint of including parts and raw materials.
To be able to trace all parts and materials and provide the information the engineers need, you must have digital data. For this, a platform that gives you full control of all materials your products contain is a must, as well as the subcontracted components that are part of the product, and the materials and emissions they contain. One such material intelligence platform is Ansys Granta MI®.
Making all relevant materials data available
Ansys Granta MI® allows you to manage all your existing and potential materials data. It has over 250,000 materials in its reference database with climate change (i.e. CO2-equivalents) data and embodied energy data for materials, processes, locations, transport, and products and parts. The platform also hosts proprietary materials information, making all relevant materials data available for all involved, including designers and product engineers. Additionally, Ansys Granta MI® can be used as a source of information for subcontracted components. Just as it can provide data on cubic meters of aluminum, it can also provide data on components that you buy from subcontractors and integrate into your products, such as a printed circuit board.
In a nutshell, Ansys Granta MI® provides materials data from the cradle to the grave.
Understand the impact of materials
By integrating Ansys Granta MI® into the design and simulation process, using Creo (CAD) and Windchill (PLM), you will have all prerequisites not only to comply with the DPP but also achieve your overall sustainability goals. The integration with Creo and Windchill enables the CAD/PLM user to understand the impact of their materials and process choices quickly. This makes it easy for the user to:
- Calculate climate change indicators of products.
- Evaluate alternative materials to improve the climate change indicator.
- Evaluate materials or combination of materials and geometric parameters to get the best balance between technical performance, sustainability and cost.
- Choose materials data that are trusted, traceable and approved by its organization.
- Understand the impact of different material choices on the design.
- Gain full control of materials and parts used in the products.
Also, using simulation reduces the need for physical prototypes, cutting CO2 emissions and waste by saving materials and energy. Virtual testing helps create efficient designs, like optimizing washing machine drums to use less water and energy. Studying flow and heat transfer leads to energy-efficient products, reducing consumption in buildings and transportation, and improving household appliances like refrigerators.
Simulations identify environmental issues early, cutting CO2 emissions throughout a product’s lifecycle. This was discussed in a webinar with Anne-Laure Hornsblow and Mikko Hinkkanen, check here the full discussion.
Simulation speeds up development, leading to fewer design iterations and faster market entry, accelerating the transition to carbon neutrality with innovative, sustainable products.
Six benefits of connecting BOM with DPP
With Windchill, any user will benefit by structuring BOM data in line with the digital product passports. This includes traceability information, such as supplier details, batch numbers, and production dates. It makes retrieval easy and seamless when creating digital product passports. Together with Ansys Granta, Windchill will be a smooth tool to manage and integrate BOM data with the digital passports. Windchill also allows regularly updates of the BOM:s, and thereby the DPP:s, with new data, like changes in suppliers, materials and components.
To summarize, we can see six obvious benefits of connecting BOM:s, using a PLM system like Windchill, with DPP:
- Enhanced traceability: Track the origin and lifecycle of each component, improving transparency and accountability.
- Regulatory compliance: Ensure compliance with regulations and standards by maintaining detailed records of materials and processes.
- Improved sustainability: Facilitate recycling and responsible disposal by providing detailed material information and end-of-life instructions.
- Better quality control: Identify and address quality issues more efficiently with detailed component histories.
- Efficient supply chain management: Improve supply chain coordination and efficiency with better visibility into component sourcing and availability.
- Report for Compliance: Generating compliance reports from multiple sources is challenging and time-consuming. Integrating data into a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system provides a single source of truth, simplifying report generation and ensuring cohesive, reliable data for audits.
Now is the time to prepare
Materials play a key role in achieving carbon reduction goals. It won’t happen by itself. You need the data and tools to make early, right decisions in the design process–and to comply with the Digital Product Passport regulation that is waiting around the corner. By complying with DPP, new opportunities with circular business models open up. Adapting a circular business model will be necessary for all industries and early adaptors will, as always, be ahead of the competitors.
In order not to find yourself in the rear seat, watching your competitors speed past with digital product passports in their hands, prepare and look over your design process today. It will not only lower your costs and simplify a life including digital product passports. You will also achieve your sustainability goals. Wouldn’t that be something?
This article is based on the talks of Martin Lundqvist, Senior PLM Business Consultant at QCM, and Manuelle Clavel, Principal Application Engineer Sustainability, Ansys, at the PDSFORUM 2024.
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