- Sincpress and Exports to the European Union
- Birth of the Digital Product Passport in the E.U.
- Digital Product Passport Warranties
The world of smart packaging will not be the same after the AIPIA Congress 2022. The Active and Intelligent Packaging Industry Association (AIPIA) held the first face-to-face version of its international event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, following the storm caused at businesses worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Right from the start, the event brought up the important concept of the Digital Product Passport, whose acronym (DPP) will be present herein for all conversations about smart packaging.
The DPP concept reinforces smart packaging as a set of tools that integrate global technological solutions for tracking, authenticity, sustainability and customer experience, enabling the delivery of the long-awaited—and now demanded—circular economy by 2050. The European Union has established a calendar for adapting products to the new DPP rules, and a deadline has been set for reaching the mandatory status of “circulation” through production lines.
There are growing attention to and concerns regarding the degradation of the environment. Imposed reductions of material discards and their reuse by processing and production lines are causing companies to turn to the world of smart packaging technologies. With that in mind, GS1, the global organization responsible for the standardization of product serialization codes, and Avery Dennison, whose platform includes the atma.io platform, were the main standard bearers of the DPP concept at the AIPIA Congress 2022.
With the new DPP rules established by the European Union (E.U.), GS1 has indicated that the replacement of barcodes by 2D codes, such as Datamatrix and QR codes, is happening gradually and irreversibly. Avery Dennison has staked its chips on the atma.io digital enterprise and its cloud of connected products to serve as the basis for sustainable connections between every item, company and human in this new-world business scenario.
Sincpress and Exports to the European Union
Sincpress, the first smart packaging center in the Southern hemisphere, discussed its vision of collaboration by creating conditions, disseminating ideas and implementing circular economy solutions in Brazil. The Brazilian organization’s participation in the AIPIA Congress event represented a step toward aligning the country with the future, in the same week that the 27th Climate Conference of the United Nations, COP 27, took place in Egypt with authorities and leaders from all over the globe.
Sincpress has occupied an exclusive position as a center of innovation in smart packaging, and it is poised to become a center of excellence in international business strategy. Since the concept of smart packaging is embedded in the Digital Product Passport, and since the DPP will impact Brazilian exports to the European Union—one of the three largest international markets for Brazil, along with China and the United States—Sincpress could be listed as a Brazilian export aid agent.
Jan Merckx, GS1 Europe’s sustainability leader, presents the Digital Product Passport at the AIPIA Congress 2022.
The company played a decisive role in the development of smart packaging projects, such as that of HP Brasil, which received the Automation Award granted by GS1’s Brazilian subsidiary, known in the Tupiniquim territory as the Brazilian Automation Association. The Harpia trophy went to HP’s Smarter Packaging project, under which the company’s customers can be sure they are purchasing original products and will be able to dispose of and recycle them properly through practices developed by HP Brasil in partnership with Sincpress. Within the HP Smarter Packaging project, each ink cartridge gains a unique identity through QR codes and RFID labels.
Paula Valerio, an executive at Sincpress who was at the AIPIA Congress, stated, “We offer smart solutions to guarantee safety and credibility to customers, through cutting-edge packaging technology, guided by user experience and responsibility toward the environment.” She added, “We are leading a movement to transform packaging from a product wrapper to a services support solution.”
Birth of the Digital Product Passport in the E.U.
Sincpress’s Paula Valerio
GS1 opened its participation in the AIPIA Congress by welcoming a proposal for the regulation of sustainable products adopted on Mar. 30, 2022, by the European Commission, which was launched under the Green Deal of the European Union, setting the objective of making the economic bloc in the first climate-neutral region by 2050. The draft regulation includes the Digital Product Passport, a new concept that GS1 Europe has been proactively engaging with for the past two years. Only certain sectors, such as food, feed and medicine, are exempt. The DPP applies to any physical goods, including components and intermediate products, placed on the E.U. market or put into service.
The regulation, for example, prohibits the destruction of unsold consumer products and establishes mandatory green public procurement criteria. The general objective of the proposal is to reduce the environmental impacts of the lifecycle of products via efficient digital solutions, and to enable the objectives of the E.U.’s industrial policy, such as increasing the demand for sustainable products and supporting their production.
The regulation establishes new duties and rights for manufacturers, importers, distributors, resellers, repairers, remanufacturers, recyclers, maintenance professionals, customers, end users, consumers, national authorities and public interest organizations, as well as the EU Commission and any organization that acts on its behalf. The Commission has also adopted the Circular and Sustainable Textile Strategy and the revision of the Construction Products Regulation.
Digital Product Passport Warranties
GS1 Europe’s Jan Merckx
The fact that products have a passport is nothing new, and it’s not new at GS1. The real change is that this is happening through legislation and leveraging green and digital transformations. The regulation refers to the DPP as a set of product-specific data, which includes data specified in the delegated act, and it must be accessible electronically via a data medium, encompassing everything comprising the concept of smart packaging.
Thus, the DPP must ensure actors along the value chain, including consumers, economic operators and competent national authorities, can access information about products. They must be able to improve traceability along the value chain, facilitate the verification of compliance by competent national authorities, and include the necessary data attributes to allow the tracking of all “substances of concern” throughout the lifecycle of covered products.
For GS1, it is important that DPPs be fully interoperable with other product passports across all product groups, including with respect to the technical, semantic and organizational aspects of interoperability, enabling end-to-end communication. “The product passport has to be an enabler of interoperability and also a necessary element to place products on the E.U. market under the conformity assessment procedure,” said Jan Merckx, GS1 Europe’s sustainability leader. The regulation stipulates that consumers, economic operators and other relevant actors must have free access to the DPP. Smart packaging is ceasing to be a choice—it’s becoming an obligation for the good of all.
Edson Perin is the editor of IoP Journal Brasil and the founder of Netpress Books Editora, a pioneer company in the production and distribution of content to radio, TV and Internet, and the publication of books on technologies for business.