Material passport
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A material passport is a digital document listing all the materials that are included in a product or construction during its life cycle in order to facilitate strategizing circularity decisions in supply chain management.[1] Passports generally consists of a set of data describing defined characteristics of materials in products, which enables the identification of value for recovery, recycling and re-use.[2] These passports have been adopted as a best practice for business process analysis and improvement in the widely applied supply chain operation reference (SCOR) by the association for supply chain management.[3]
The core idea behind the concept is that a material passport will contribute to a more circular economy, in which materials are being recovered, recycled and/or re-used in an open-traded material market. The concept of the 'material passport’ is currently being developed by multiple parties in primarily European countries. Such a passport could make possible second-hand material markets or material banks in the future.
Similar types of passports for the circular economy are being developed by several parties under a variety of terminology.[1] Other names for the material passport are:
- Circularity passport [4]
- Cradle-to-cradle passport [5]
- Product passport [6]
Closely related concepts, which share some of the life cycle registrations that passports also support, are the bill of materials, product life cycle management, digital twin, and ecolabels. The key difference in these concepts is that a passport provides an identity of a single identifiable object and acts as a certified interface to all life-cycle registrations a product is concerned with.[1]