Digital Product Passports, an Antidote to Greenwashing?

As consumers grow increasingly aware of the need for sustainability and protecting our environment from the effects of our consumption and life style, too many companies have used a lack of transparently available facts to do greenwashing. Nice words and symbolic gestures, but no real change, no substantial improvements.

We expect digital product passports (DPP) to change that entirely.

The digital product passports regulation is about making verified facts easily accessible. About empowering consumers through transparency. Answering questions like:

🔵 Can it be repaired? How?

🔵 Is the battery possible to exchange?

🔵 What is the carbon footprint of this thing?

• Including disposal

• Cleary separating carbon emissions caused and any CO2 compensation made, not just the net - we hope

🔵 Can I be sure no child- or forced labour was involved? Or deforestation?

🔵 How can it be reused, recycled or disposed of responsibly?

🔵 How does it compare with the alternatives?

This is why it is so important that the information in DPP's is standardised, uniform and easy to access and understand. And that it is independently verified and continuously updated as designs or processes change, or sub-suppliers change.

The more consumers trust and use the digital product passports, and modify their buying habits based on the facts presented, the higher the incentive for producers to modify designs, methods and choice of suppliers to improve the "environmental performance" of their products. Or be prepared to lose market share.

Just as intended by the EU lawmakers.

If only greenwashing was as easy to detect as Pinocchio's lies

Image by malerapaso on iStock