Digital Product Passport and Administrative Burden Reduction

Abstract

The European Union has put forward an ambitious EU Green Deal with the goal to advance the green and circular transition in the EU. Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are introduced in several legislations as a powerful new tool that can enable product data sharing with downstream value chains partners, like re-manufacturers and recyclers, as well as with consumers and authorities, to enable the transition towards more circular practices. These DPPs are intended not only to pose limited additional administrative burden but also act as a mechanism to allow for generating business benefits, to incentivize companies into changing their business processes towards more circularity. At the same time, the European Commission’s recent focus on EU competitiveness has highlighted the role DPPs are foreseen to play as an instrument to reduce the administrative reporting burden as well. Whether and how DPP may play a role in reducing the administrative burden is the focus of this research. To this end, a stakeholder consultation was conducted where representatives from different industries, technology providers, NGOs and academia were invited to express their ideas on the topic. Subsequently 10 high-level areas of potential for administrative burden reduction using the DPP were identified. In this paper, we zoom in further on one of these dimensions, namely the potential of DPP to streamline cross-legislation and cross-jurisdictional compliance. By performing in-depth interpretative analysis of the ideas related to this theme, a rich understanding of this potential was elaborated. While administrative burden reduction, from a theoretical perspective, has been studied before in the eGovernment and international trade literature, DPP had previously not been taken into account. This study advances this theoretical discussion by introducing DPPs as part of the scientific discourse.