"Commodities from multiple suppliers – how will that be dealt with?"

Looking at the industries for which digital product passports will first be introduced, a question arises. How will the regulation handle the situation where an input, a commodity, is sourced from more than one supplier, and gets mixed during the manufacturing process?

Plastics, chemicals and textile raw materials immediately come to mind, but it may very well be the case also for batteries, construction and furniture. Maybe even electronics and ICT. For vehicles it's probably less of a worry, though.

Will manufacturers be required to separate, for example, plastic pellets from different suppliers to be able to track exactly from which supplier the pellets used for an item were sourced – and make sure that specific item is provided with exactly that data? Obviously, that would greatly complicate the management of digital product passport data for that industry And how will it impact the production process and supply chain? Will they need to change how they store and produce? How big a change? At what cost?

Or will it suffice that producers make sure all suppliers provide the information needed, meet the standards and have all certificates? It seems like a more efficient approach – if everything runs smoothly, that is. But what happens if one supplier fails in some aspect? Will sales be stopped for ALL products that can not be proven not to contain raw materials from that supplier? That would actually be more in line with the deforestation directive that is already in place. How would you handle a recall in that scenario?

We don't know the answer to how the European Commission and Parliament plan to deal with this issue, but to us it's obvious that they need to consider how to handle it and what the implications will be.

Maybe you know?

If so, why not write a post about it in our Community, preferably referring back to this blog post.

We don't envy the lawmakers trying to solve things like this

Image by Vizerskaya on iPhoto