The production of hardware such as phones, laptops, servers, and networking devices consumes critical natural resources. Mining raw materials for these devices pollutes water, air, and soil. Our data doesn’t exist in an abstract “cloud” but resides in physical devices that require ongoing resource consumption. Without proper recycling, these devices risk becoming e-waste, further contributing to environmental damage. This growing impact underscores the need to critically evaluate what we build in the digital realm and how we build it. Sustainable practices in ICT are no longer optional – they are essential.
Digital product passports will soon be mandatory for almost all physical goods sold in the EU market. The digital product passport is a key enabler of the EU’s vision for sustainable and circular product ecosystems. Introduced as part of the Ecodesign Requirements for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), digital product passports aim to improve product transparency, support circularity, and reduce environmental harm.
To achieve the desired circular economy outcomes, digital product passports must enable continuous collection, processing, sharing, and use of data by multiple stakeholders. This requires interoperable systems that store and share data across the digital product passport ecosystem for all related products throughout their lifecycle – from raw materials to recycling. Such systems will generate increasing amounts of data and require large-scale data processing, which must be sustainably managed to minimise the burden on our planet.
Traditional design methods validate that new digital services will create value for users and businesses, ensuring that the viability of a product or service is assessed before the development of new digital services or features begins. While digital product passports are expected to support more sustainable consumption, realising these expectations requires systemic and behavioural change. Crucially, digital product passports must not be built solely for regulatory compliance but as tools to drive the transformation needed for a circular economy. This demands active efforts to understand customer value, develop new circular business models, and foster collaboration within the ecosystem.
Once use cases and business value are validated, it is vital to assess the environmental impacts of a digital product passport system. Even solutions designed to enhance sustainability, like digital product passport, must be scrutinised to ensure the methods and technologies used to create them don’t offset their positive impacts. Just as ecodesign regulation demand sustainable product design, the digital product passport systems must also be ecodesigned. Only by adopting this holistic approach can we create truly sustainable digital product passport ecosystem.
The system architecture and physical location of data storage significantly influence the carbon emissions of a digital product passport system. The carbon intensity of a region depends on its energy sources. While fossil fuels increase carbon intensity, clean and renewable energy reduce it. Reserved server capacity and the volume of stored data translate directly into electricity and hardware consumption. Digital product passport systems include three key elements essential for accessing digital product passports: data carriers, unique identifiers, and applications. Each of these components has environmental implications that must be carefully considered to achieve regulatory and business objectives with minimal environmental harm.
Standardised, interoperable solutions, combined with global alignment and strong incentives for adoption, will be essential to ensure that the DPP delivers on its expected circularity objectives while mitigating its own environmental footprint by minimising the data volume, computing and hardware requirements.
Our guide to building green digital product passport systems offers a comprehensive checklist for designing and implementing effective digital product passport systems while addressing their environmental footprint. An eco-designed digital product passport system isn’t only more eco-friendly but also more reliable, secure, and cost-efficient.