Brought to you by Sónia Martins da Cunha, Berend Mintjes, José Mogollón – Institute for Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University

The transition to a digitalised and zero-emission EU relies heavily on renewable energy technology that requires significant amounts of Critical Raw Materials (CRM). This dependency threatens the resilience of EU businesses and challenges the Green Deal’s ambition for a sustainable, equitable, and digitalized Europe. To address these concerns, the European Commission is advocating for a Circular Economy (CE) approach, that prioritises strategies such as reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and ultimately recycling (RE-strategies).

Aside from limiting dependence on CRMs, RE-strategies generally attenuate the need for primary resources, aiding in the reduction of products’ impacts on the environment. Quantifying this effect, however, is complicated and resource intensive.

In this article, we outline how the digital product passport (DPP) and the CE-RISE information system can ease the process of environmental impact calculation by leveraging the DPPs information-sharing capabilities for Life Cycle Assessment.

What is LCA?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) plays a crucial role in comparing the environmental impacts of products and evaluating the benefits of different RE-strategies. LCA is used to assess the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product’s life, from raw material extraction to production, distribution, use, and end-of-life management.

How about the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF)?

Results of an LCA can include numerous environmental impacts, including climate change, water use, and energy consumption, among others. To standardise these impact assessments, the European Commission introduced the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), which provides rules to follow within the LCA approach. The PEF covers 16 impact categories including climate change, use of different resources, eutrophication of different environments, acidification, or human toxicity. As for data needs, the PEF mandates the use of high-quality data that ensures the consistency, comparability, and transparency of the results.

Challenges

As a result, a product-specific, comprehensive, PEF-compliant LCA requires vast amounts of accurate data, which is often unavailable or inconsistent across value chains. In many cases, primary data gathering is not an option (e.g. because of time or resource constraints, lack of communication between value chain actors, or the absence of source information). Therefore, LCA practitioners regularly fall back on more generic secondary datasets. Such datasets often do not accurately reflect the specific process in the value chain under study, e.g. lacking a specific location or using a more generalised process in lieu of a specific one. In this way, a lack of available primary data negatively affects the accuracy and increases the uncertainty in the study’s results.

Digital Product Passport as a solution

In addition to being a tool for traceability, the Digital Product Passport (DPP) emerges as a transformative solution to bridge such data gaps. If information on the impacts of processes is shared through the DPP, this limits the burden of data gathering for value chain actors to only gathering data on their own processes.

The CE-RISE information system, in turn, can then link actors along value chains and make use of product- and value chain-specific primary data to perform an LCA, thereby leveraging DPPs to calculate comparable environmental impacts. In this way, CE-RISE promotes more informed decision-making and policy development, and contributes to a more sustainable and conscious future.