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What has to be true before a passport changes a decision

The claim that Digital Product Passports make supply chains more sustainable compresses about six separate things into one sentence, and every one of them can fail on its own. The information has to exist, be about this object, be right, reach somebody with the authority to act, arrive in time and in a usable form, then change a decision that would otherwise have gone the other way. The only controlled study we found reports large time savings and a lower salvage rate in the same experiment.

Sources as at
28 August 2026
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The short answer

A passport does not produce a sustainability outcome. It can make a better decision possible, which is a much narrower claim and a considerably more useful one, because it tells you what to check.

Every argument for a passport improving repair, reuse, remanufacturing or recycling runs through a chain with six links in it. Miss any one and the record still exists, the code still resolves and nothing downstream changes. Most of the disappointment in this subject comes from projects that built links one and two and assumed the other four.

The chain also tells you where to look for evidence that any of it works. What you want is not a project that produced a passport. It is a project that measured a decision, against a comparison where the passport was absent. Those are rare. We found one with a control condition and a stated sample, and its results point in both directions at once.

Where the chain holds, and it is not where the marketing points

The chain holds reliably in one situation. The object stays inside a known relationship for its whole life.

A machine on a service contract, a fleet asset, a leased device, an item under warranty, a component returning to the remanufacturer that built it. In every one of those the actor who eventually makes the decision is identified, has an account, has the object's identifier, has a commercial reason to look and is doing skilled work at a pace where reading something is affordable. Links three to six are satisfied by the relationship rather than by the technology.

The chain breaks reliably in the mirror image. The object leaves the relationship and arrives anonymously in a stream, at volume, at speed, in the hands of somebody with no prior connection to it. We have worked that case in detail at the textile end, and the conclusion is unflattering to the whole category: what actually arrives at a sorting line is the object, whatever survives of its labels and a machine reading of the surface. There is no fourth thing, and the question the line has to answer is a measurement rather than a lookup.

That contrast is the useful shape of the whole subject. Circularity marketing tends to illustrate itself with the second case, which is where the environmental story is most vivid and the mechanism is weakest. The evidence, such as it is, sits in the first case, which is less photogenic and mostly business to business.

The one study we found with a control condition

The strongest measured evidence we found is a published case study by researchers at Politecnico di Milano, IMT Mines Ales and the University of Cambridge, evaluating a passport for remanufacturing using the Asset Administration Shell. It matters because of its design rather than its scale. Two scenarios were run, one remanufacturing a product without a passport and one with a passport supporting the remanufacturability assessment, at 10 experiments per scenario and 20 in total.

The product was a gearbox of three screws, two aluminium lids and two 3D printed gears, tracked with RFID against a cloud hosted Asset Administration Shell across facilities in Cambridge and Milan. That is a laboratory, and the authors say so.

Across the 10 runs in the passport condition, cycle time fell by 44 per cent and quality check time fell by 67 per cent against the 10 runs without it. Excluding the units that were disposed of rather than remanufactured, the same two figures across those runs were 15 per cent and 47 per cent. Disassembly time fell by 6 per cent across the 10 runs. So far this is the story everybody expects.

Two results in the same experiment point the other way. Salvage rate by components was 12.5 per cent lower in the passport condition across those 10 runs than without it, and the authors describe the finding as a trade off between operational efficiency and environmental impact. Operator workload rose by 43 per cent across the same runs.

Read those together and the honest summary is that the passport made the process faster and made the operator work harder, and the faster process recovered fewer components. A protocol that decides sooner also decides to dispose sooner. Nobody selling this technology has an interest in reporting that, and the researchers reported it.

The authors state their own limits plainly, and they are the limits that matter. Replacement parts were assumed to be perfect, which does not reflect industry conditions. The passport was assumed always to provide accurate information, with subsequent quality checks consistently agreeing with it. And the numerical results depend heavily on the specificities of the 10 experiments, which makes it hard to estimate how much they would vary.

That second assumption is the one to hold onto. The study measured what happens when a passport is right. It did not measure what happens when a passport is wrong, and a system that acts faster on a record it trusts is a system that propagates a bad record faster too.

What a feasibility trial is, and what it is not

A recent example shows how quickly the distinction gets lost between a demonstrator and a result.

In August 2026 a story circulated across UK manufacturing trade press describing a six month trial of Digital Product Passports by the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland with Circulus CRM Limited, a Glasgow business working in electrical equipment repair and remanufacturing. Electrical assets were linked to digital records through QR codes, and the work was carried out against a replica of the company's own business management system so that operations were not disrupted.

Here is what the coverage does and does not contain. It does not state how many assets carried a record, how long the phases ran, what was measured, what the comparison was or who funded it. The reported outcome is that customer feedback indicated strong interest. The stated next step is piloting with clients and seeking further funding to scale. We looked for original project material at NMIS and at Circulus and did not find a project page, a release or a report at either, so everything here rests on trade coverage rather than on a primary project source. That is a statement about where we looked rather than a claim that nothing exists.

None of that is a criticism of the work. A demonstrator built against a replica system, proving that a passport can be integrated into a live operational stack without breaking it, is a legitimate and necessary thing to do. It is link one and link two of the chain, done properly.

It is the headline treatment that will not survive contact with the chain. Some versions of the story describe the technology as proven in a real world remanufacturing environment. Nothing in the body of any version supports the word proven, because no comparison was run and no outcome was measured. That is a reading rule worth keeping: when a story reports enthusiasm rather than a number, the number was not collected, and when it reports a number without a population, the number is not evidence whichever direction it points.

The same rule applies upwards. The EU funded CIRPASS-2 programme lists 13 lighthouse pilots, of which 6 are textiles, 5 electronics, 1 construction and 1 tyres, and several are explicitly about repair and second life. It is a substantial body of work. We did not find published operational results from those pilots at the project's own results pages as at August 2026, which means it is currently evidence of activity rather than evidence of outcome.

Adoption is not an outcome

The most common way a sustainability claim gets manufactured in this subject is by reporting an adoption figure as though it were a result.

A Horizon 2020 project built a platform generating material passports for buildings from design models. Its published results record the database growing from just over 300 square metres of registered floor area at the end of 2017 to more than 2.5 million square metres by the close of the project in 2019. That is a real and impressive number about a platform. It is not a number about material reused, carbon avoided or demolition prevented, and the published results do not carry one.

The battery sector has been more careful with itself than most. When the Global Battery Alliance launched its battery passport proof of concept in 2023 it said in its own announcement that the data quality in the passports had not been fully verified and was partly complemented with reasonable estimates, and that the manufacturers involved had piloted the tools on selected raw material supply chains rather than on all battery inputs. Its second wave in 2024 covered 11 pilot consortia including 8 battery manufacturers. Stating the caveat in the launch release is the behaviour to copy.

There is also a live baseline that gets forgotten in discussions of what a product register might one day do. The European Product Registry for Energy Labelling has been running for years as a mandatory, publicly reachable product register under Regulation (EU) 2017/1369, and for some product groups its entries already carry links to spare parts lists, indicative spare part costs, repair instructions and dismantling information for recyclers. Anybody arguing that a passport will make repair happen should be able to say what EPREL has already produced, because that is the closest thing to a natural experiment the European system has.

The counter argument to all of this is worth stating in its strongest form, and it has been made by people close to the technology. Writing for the World Economic Forum in March 2026, authors from Trillium Digital Services, Circularise and the Forum argued that circular products face harsher transparency demands than virgin ones, and put the position bluntly: "Information alone does not enable circularity." Their reason is the one this page keeps arriving at from a different direction. "Physical infrastructure, skills and regional capacity remain the primary constraints in many value chains."

What follows for a business

The conclusion is not that this work is pointless. It is that the reason usually given for doing it is the weakest reason available, and better reasons exist.

  1. Record the attributes that decide a downstream decision, not the ones that photograph well. For a repairer that is fasteners, part numbers, tools and sequence. For a processor it is what is attached to the material rather than the material itself. These are known at design and lost within a season, which makes recording them a discipline question rather than a technology question.
  2. Fix identity before content. Every link after the first depends on the record being about the object in front of somebody, and what allocating an identifier commits you to is a decision with a long tail.
  3. Ask any case study two questions. What was the denominator, and what was the counterfactual. Almost nothing in this subject survives both, and the things that do are worth much more than the things that do not.
  4. Assume the record has to outlive your interest in it. The decision a passport might change happens years after the sale, and what happens when the link stops answering is a procurement question you can settle now.
  5. Do not buy an environmental outcome. Buy a decision. If a supplier cannot name the decision, the actor and the moment, there is no chain and the record will sit unread.

The version of the argument this estate is prepared to defend is narrower than the one in circulation and it holds up better. A Digital Product Passport can make a better lifecycle decision possible. Whether that produces an environmental benefit depends on the information being accurate, usable, available to somebody with the authority to act and connected to a decision that would otherwise have gone the other way. Where those conditions hold, the measured evidence shows real time savings and at least one trade off nobody advertises. Where they do not hold, a passport is a record of a product, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to own for other reasons and is not a circularity strategy.

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