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CircThread and Digital Product Passport Workshop

The workshop “CircThread and Digital Product Passports” was organized and hosted by EcoWise UK, Technical coordinators for the EU H2020 project CircThreadBuilding the Digital Thread for Circular Economy Product, Resource & Service Management and itwas held online on May 04th, 2022.

The workshop was attended by almost 60 people who are included as part of the CircThread project wider stakeholder community. The workshop also attracted diverse organisations, project external stakeholder group and industry players including big tech organisations from the Silicon Valley.

The aim of the workshop is to present the latest insights on the new EU legislation towards Sustainable products initiative and related Digital Product Passport proposal, and how the CircThread project is approaching this topic. The highlights of the workshop mainly were presented on the CircThread project context, summary of the EU proposal for new framework on EcoDesign for Sustainable Products Passport released in March 2022.

The key timeline of activities, its impact and complexity and towards the end of the workshop capture perspectives from the attendees in an interactive approach. Useful insights from the interactive workshop resulted to understand the potential barriers, benefits, main concerns, and solutions in implementing the Digital Product Passport with reference to the ongoing initiative and the new EU legislation in general.

Workshop context

The EU commission has recently launched a new raft of legislative proposals intended to make sustainable and circular products the norm in Europe. A core proposed instrument to make this happen is the digital product passport: a digital information record linked to a product tag that is physically attached to the product, to unlock information sharing across the product life cycle. The intended information providers and users of the digital product passport include supply chain businesses, consumers, recyclers, repairers, maintenance professionals, and national authorities.

The current legislative proposal sets the overall framework for the digital product passport. Specifics needed to implement the digital product passport have yet to follow following further legislation and consultations. In line with this overall development, the EU funded CircThead research and innovation project is already exploring the frontier in digital product passports, and in exchanging information across the product life cycle, together with companies, producer responsibility organisations, repair companies, consumer bodies, and recyclers in Spain, Slovenia, and Italy.

This session was organized using a Lucid Spark board shared with the attendees in directing them to share their views over four questions or topics to initiate the context and enabling them to provide their answers or views using sticky notes presented on to the board.

The session lasted for 40 mins and the results captured from the interactive session have been made available to the CircThread Stakeholder community

Please join the CircThread Stakeholders Community to know more about the project latest updates and notified on the upcoming events.

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