SBS Priority Topic 41: Digital product passport
Draft European and International standards, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI draft standards, ISO and IEC draft standards supporting Digital Product Passport concept.
Draft European and International standards, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI draft standards, ISO and IEC draft standards supporting Digital Product Passport concept.
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Small Business Standards (SBS), the SME representing the voice of Small and Medium Enterprises in European and international standardisation, is sponsoring this service.
Information on Draft Standards for Digital Products Passport
Small and Medium Enterprises are increasingly following the European Draft standards corresponding to the Standardisation request M/604, COMMISSION IMPLEMENTING DECISION of 31.7.2024 on a standardisation request to the European Committee for Standardisation, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation, and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute as regards digital product passports in support of Union policy on ecodesign requirements for sustainable products and on batteries and waste batteries.
The product passport is an important tool to foster the sustainability of products and the transition to sustainable business models by making information available to actors along the entire value chain. The availability of a product passport should significantly enhance end-to-end traceability of a product throughout its value chain, help consumers make informed choices by providing access to product information relevant to them, allow economic operators and other value chain actors such as repairers or recyclers to access relevant information, and enable competent national authorities to perform their duties.
The data carrier and the unique identifiers should be created to ensure that the information contained in the product passport can be accessed, recorded and transmitted by all economic operators, depending on their access rights, as well as to guarantee the compatibility of the unique identifier with external components such as scanning devices.
Unique identification of products is a fundamental element to enable traceability across the supply chain. Therefore, the product passport should be linked to a unique product identifier. In addition, where appropriate, the passport should allow for the tracing of the economic operators and facilities involved in the supply chain.
Harmonised European standards will improve the quality of data captured in product passports by providing explicit definitions, guidelines and validation rules. This helps ensure that the data is accurate, complete and consistent. In addition, it is expected that they will cover:
Unique identifiers
(a) Global uniqueness of each identifier (i.e., the same identifier can not be assigned to different products, different economic operators, or different facilities),
(b) Syntax-related requirements,
(c) Semantic-related requirements,
The standards shall consider the diversity of identifiers currently used by economic operators and accommodate them as much as possible, for example, through contextual prefix (e.g., issuing agencies codes) where relevant. The standard(s) should allow both the possibility to use ‘centralised’ and ‘decentralised’ identifiers.
The unique product identifier should always refer to a product, being it at model, batch, or item level. The maximum length of the unique product identifier string should be 70 characters.
In order to promote interoperability, reduce costs for companies, and support coherency and consistency of digitalisation efforts, the standard(s) developed should adequately take into account typology of identifiers already used in other European legislations and initiatives.
Standards on data carriers
The standard(s) shall define common rules for how to construct the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) media to be used as data carrier linked to the product passport.
The requirements should concern, as applicable:
(a) symbology characteristics,
(b) data character encoding methods,
(c) symbol formats,
(d) dimensional characteristics,
(e) error correction rules,
(f) reference decoding algorithm,
(g) printing quality requirements,
(h) production quality requirements,
(i) user-selectable application parameters (if relevant)
Standards on links between physical product and digital representation, look-up mechanism
The standard(s) shall define clear rules and requirements related to access control measures to regulate the access to restricted product passport information.
Standards on interoperability (technical, semantic, organisation), including data exchange protocols and formats and data processing (introduction, modification, update)
The standard(s) shall define, inter alia, rules related to:
(a) Semantic description of a product, including but not limited to unambiguous meaning and consistent naming, where relevant a value list, a specific format and defined units of measure for all quantitative values,
(b) a common information model allowing for the implementation of dictionary systems,
(c) Data exchange protocols, including rules to exchange data between two or more parties,
(d) Processes to introduce, modify, and update information in the passport,
(e) Data models and formats to be used in exchange and representation.
Standards on data storage and data persistence
The standard(s) shall define rules for decentralised data storage and data persistence. Persistence is required to make sure that data included in the product passports would remain available even when the economic operator creating the passport is no longer active.
Standards on data authentication, reliability, integrity
The standard(s) shall provide an open and interoperable method, between automated identification services and data carriers, to read data, verify data originality and data integrity in offline and online use cases. It/They shall establish a framework for ensuring trust, interoperability and interoperation via secure and reliable electronically signed encoded data set (ESEDS) schemes for multi-actor applications in multi-sector environment.
Standards on data security and privacy
The standard(s) shall identify rules to guarantee IT-security and data protection. Existing relevant standards should be duly considered when drafting the new harmonised standard(s).