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Which side effects will the introduction of digital product passports carry? Such a major reform won't come without any repercussions beyond the stated intent of encouraging circularity in manufacturing and consumption, right?
One such side effect we expect, or hope for, is a favouring of responsible businesses at the expense of rogue businesses, particularly counterfeiters.
Wouldn't it be surprising if a modern system carrying product data was introduced without integrating authentication of both products and the accompanying data?
Keep in mind that about 5% of all products sold in the European Union are counterfeit (not counting those just slapping a fake product on products that don't even try to imitate originals, we guess). If you were an EU regulator introducing such a reform, would you be happy with such a substantial portion of the market appearing with product data that weren't valid?
It doesn't take much insight into the practices of counterfeiters to realise that they don't care much about following the original specifications for materials and practices for the products they copy. As long as it's cheap and looks close enough to fool consumers, they are happy. No-one should expect the recycling instructions for the original product to apply for the copy, nor the instructions for reparation or maintenance.
So we expect the upcoming systems for digital product passports to integrate both a method for authenticating the physical product as well as a method for validating the data provided in the passport. That would make it much more difficult to peddle counterfeits. Something we don't expect to many to lament, apart from counterfeiters.
Image by Dino Geromella on iStock
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