DPP4Electronics

In March 2022 the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) was proposed which defines requirements to significantly improve the circularity, energy efficiency and environmental characteristics of products. A vital measure of this regulation is the Digital Product Passport (DPP) which facilitates the mandatory disclosure of product information (such as product composition, environmental impact and instructions for repair, maintenance and recycling) of manufacturing companies and its sharing among all stakeholders of a product’s life cycle. The legally compliant disclosure and reuse of product information poses several challenges at the technological, organizational and legal level. Companies need to adjust their IT infrastructure and corresponding business processes in accordance with the legal requirements. Disclosure obligations might interfere with existing business models, IPR strategies or trade secrets. And the long term storage and availability of product data might affect liability and consumer protection issues. These challenges are especially critical for SMEs with limited technological capabilities and expertise. To address the above mentioned challenges, the project DPP4Electronics will: (i) investigate the compliance issues associated with the implementation of a Digital Product Passport and its impacts on the business models of actors of an electronics supply chain, (ii ) conceptualize a robust and flexible data infrastructure for generating, managing and maintaining DPPs that takes account of a company's digital and technical capabilities, (iii) align existing data exchange practices to proposed norms and standards for interoperability to enable a seamless flow of distributed data between systems at the syntactic and semantic level, and (vi) suggest an appropriate governance, model and policies for data access and exchange that ensure sovereignty, security, transparency, nuanced usage control and compliance in trusted data spaces. The project will address these issues by simulating an electronics supply chain for three electronic products of varying degrees of compositional complexity and build DPP demonstrators on real-world data for these products. The funding will allow the consortium to leverage the necessary resources to investigate the technical, organizational and legal requirements of a DPP for electronics and learn about the challenges and nuances of large-scale data sharing between decentralized actors of different size, culture and business rationale. The partners will benefit from enhanced traceability and interoperability that will streamline design, procurement, production, and recycling processes, fostering at the same time cost savings and improving their market presence.