Digital Product Passports Promise Greener Data, But Life Cycle Assessment Needs More Detail

Digital product passports are rapidly becoming one of the most ambitious data infrastructures in the global economy. Formalised under the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, these machine-readable records are designed to accompany products throughout their life cycles, documenting everything from material composition and recycled content to product carbon footprints. Now, a team of researchers led by Yanan Liang of Leiden University’s Institute of Environmental Sciences has examined whether these emerging systems can do something more profound: rescue life cycle assessment, the scientific workhorse of environmental accounting, from its chronic data problems. Writing in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the team analysed 20 publicly documented digital product passport initiatives, assessed as of April 2025, and found both striking promise and stubborn gaps in how these systems structure the information that rigorous environmental assessment demands.

The stakes are higher than they might appear. Life cycle assessment, or LCA, is the standardised method for quantifying the potential environmental impacts of products and services from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use, and disposal. Yet the method has long been constrained by limited access to primary data, meaning company-specific, measurement-based information. Most practitioners instead rely on secondary life cycle inventory datasets that often lack geographical, temporal, and technological representativeness. Previous studies have documented the consequences: assessments of electric mobility are hampered by scarce primary data for battery raw material supply chains, and researchers have repeatedly flagged persistent challenges in traceability and interoperability across inventory databases. The field has recurrently called for better access to primary data, along with standardised metadata covering temporal representativeness, location, technology specifications, and energy sources.

This is where digital product passports enter the picture. Originally conceived to support supply chain traceability, regulatory compliance, and circular economy objectives, passports could in principle reduce reliance on outdated secondary datasets by embedding harmonised, machine-readable, product-level information on material composition, product characteristics, and environmental indicators. The relationship is potentially bidirectional: while passports improve access to verifiable product-level data, LCA offers a science-based, standardised methodological framework for structuring and interpreting that information, including established principles for defining system boundaries and assessing data quality. The Leiden-led team set out to move beyond conceptual wish lists and ask how real, emerging passport initiatives actually perform in practice.

The 20 initiatives examined span batteries, electronics, construction products, textiles, and other material-intensive sectors, and include research projects, policy platforms, industrial implementations, and standardisation efforts. The sample was assembled purposively from publicly documented initiatives rather than as a systematic or exhaustive inventory, and the researchers grouped the LCA-relevant attributes they found into four categories: assessment results, product characteristics, production characteristics, and end-of-life characteristics. The good news is that several core attributes are now common across initiatives. Material composition, sometimes reported with absolute masses, recycled content, hazardous substances information, and product carbon footprints appear frequently and could provide a genuine basis for improved LCA practice. Notably, many of these attributes require limited incremental effort, because companies already collect them for compliance with regulations such as the restriction of hazardous substances directive and the REACH chemicals regulation.

The dominant logic across many initiatives is the exchange of aggregated product carbon footprints along the value chain. Frameworks such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Pathfinder and PACT, sectoral standards like Together for Sustainability in the chemical industry, and the automotive data space Catena-X all follow a similar inheritance-based calculation model: each supply chain actor calculates a cradle-to-gate carbon footprint based on its own processes, passes the aggregated result downstream, and the next user multiplies the received figure by the quantity of input product to derive its own footprint. This approach reduces the reporting burden considerably, but it creates comparability challenges. Consistent use of carbon footprints requires alignment in methodological and modelling choices, such as system boundaries and background inventory datasets, which is difficult to guarantee in heterogeneous supply chains. Although sectoral guidelines like the Catena-X carbon footprint rulebook and the Global Battery Alliance calculation framework attempt harmonisation, the researchers found that the analysed initiatives prioritise technical interoperability and data exchange formats over full end-to-end methodological alignment.

The deeper problem is granularity. Aggregated carbon footprints mask the processes, technological parameters, geographical conditions, and operational behaviours that drive environmental impacts. For most LCA-based decisions, such aggregation is overly simplified: researchers need process-specific data to identify impact hotspots across a product life cycle, assess whether impacts are merely shifted elsewhere, or design mitigation strategies. Yet generating and sharing process-specific inventory data is genuinely difficult in practice. It increases reporting burden, requires frequent updates, and may expose commercially sensitive information such as production efficiencies and technology choices. The trade-off, the authors argue, is not only technical but organisational and governance-related: the data that is most informative for LCA is often also the least shareable within supply chains. Some passport architectures already include tiered access rights to manage this tension, restricting detailed data to accredited actors such as regulators or auditors, which strengthens verification but may limit broader analytical use.

The asymmetry extends across life cycle stages. The analysed initiatives predominantly capture upstream and mid-stream product attributes, while providing limited coverage of production conditions, use-stage performance, and end-of-life outcomes. Factory energy use and sources, geographical and temporal metadata, and end-of-life parameters appear far less frequently than composition data. The researchers emphasise that this is not simply a design flaw but reflects structural differences in data controllability. Upstream and mid-stream information sits closer to the manufacturer’s sphere of influence and is often already collected for procurement, compliance, traceability, or quality control. In contrast, use and end-of-life outcomes depend on factors beyond direct producer control, including user behaviour, local infrastructure, and downstream waste management systems. As a result, downstream information in current passports mainly reflects intended use conditions, repair guidance, or recyclability claims rather than measured outcomes, marking a structural boundary to what passports can realistically provide at the point of product placement.

End-of-life modelling deserves particular attention. In LCA practice, end-of-life modelling combines factual data, such as recycling or landfilling rates, with scenario assumptions. If end-of-life impacts are embedded within an aggregated carbon footprint, they must be sufficiently disaggregated to separate assumed downstream scenarios from upstream processes. But dynamic, product-specific end-of-life performance data is rarely available in verifiable form and generally falls outside the practical scope of passport systems. Downstream actors are unlikely to feed operational data into individual passports, and many end-of-life outcomes are inherently modelled rather than measured. The authors caution that expecting passports to resolve these limitations risks conflating product-level information systems with broader waste-system monitoring infrastructures. Instead, they argue, passports should frame end-of-life information as scenario input: structured guidance on plausible product-specific pathways that supports more consistent downstream assumptions without exceeding industry’s reporting capacity.

The way forward, according to the team, involves embedding established LCA principles directly into passport data models. That means integrating system boundaries, functional units, provenance rules, and data quality indicators, so that passport information remains interpretable and comparable across supply chains. Transparency in current LCA practice is itself uneven, with many datasets in widely used inventory databases lacking accessible documentation, consistent metadata, or traceable sources. Passports could help by requiring product-level data in machine-readable, interoperable formats with explicit provenance and methodological metadata, and by clearly labelling proxy data that can be replaced when verified primary information becomes available. Verification itself should be understood in a differentiated sense, ranging from self-declared and documented data to audited or measured values. Passports cannot eliminate diversity in LCA practice, the authors note, but they can make that diversity visible and auditable, turning opaque uncertainty into an attribute that can be examined and managed. Dynamic update mechanisms, such as change logs and timestamps, could further allow passports to function as living datasets rather than static records.

Ultimately, the researchers conclude, digital product passports and life cycle assessment can be mutually reinforcing: passports offer a pathway to structured, product-level information, while LCA provides the methodological backbone for interpreting it. Realising that complementarity requires deliberate shifts in design and governance, including moving beyond aggregated indicators towards disaggregated inventory data on energy use, critical raw material intensity, and provenance, while recognising that passports should complement rather than replace existing inventory databases. Harmonised reporting conventions aligned with ISO and Product Environmental Footprint principles would make assessments more representative, transparent, and reproducible. If those shifts materialise, the humble product passport could evolve from a static compliance tool into a dynamic infrastructure for actionable sustainability assessment, one that links product information with material, environmental, and socio-economic flows for regulators, auditors, repairers, recyclers, and consumers alike.

Subject of Research: Data structuring in digital product passport initiatives and their support for life cycle assessment

Article Title: Emerging digital product passport initiatives require improved data structuring to support life cycle assessment

Article References: Liang, Y., Mogollón, J. M., Cunha, S., Donati, F., Li, C., Mintjes, B., Kleijn, R., Climent, D. M., Wang, R., Muller, S., Mas-Fons, A., Xicotencatl, B. M., & Istrate, R. (2026). Emerging digital product passport initiatives require improved data structuring to support life cycle assessment. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2131-2139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00144-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00144-7

Keywords: digital product passport, life cycle assessment, life cycle inventory, product carbon footprint, circular economy, ecodesign regulation, end-of-life modelling, data quality, supply chain traceability, industrial ecology, sustainability data, EU regulation