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. 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. 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. 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. Other names for the material passport are:
Circularity passport Cradle-to-cradle passport Product passport 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.
Significance "According to United Nations estimates, construction accounts for some 50 percent of raw material consumption in Europe and 60 percent of waste." Assuming that the earth is a closed system, this situation is objectively untenable. There is an urgent need to deal with raw materials in a more sophisticated manner. A shift in the building sector would greatly benefit movement towards needing less material, and using material more effectively, e.g., by ensuring a much longer and more useful life cycle. Proponents of the material passport argue that it is a step in this direction. The material passport gives material an identity. By acknowledging that the material exists in a given form in a specific building, it ensures that the material receives and keeps a value, e.g., through a possible re-use after the deconstruction of a building for example. Like a personal passport, the material passport allows the material to 'travel,' or identifies the most useful future destination after it has served in a building (or other project/product). This could be in another building or in another product altogether. By recognizing the individual materials in buildings (or other products), new ownership structures could be facilitated that would enable more functions to be offered as a service. As lighting can be provided as a service, functions such as "shelter from elements" could be a service instead of owning a roof. In general, material passports create incentives for suppliers to produce and developers / managers / renovators to choose healthy, sustainable and circular materials/building products. They fit into a broader and growing movement that aims at developing circular building business models.
Applicability The material passport can be applied to every product or construction. There are different levels in which a product/construct can be discomposed:
Product level Component level Material level For a building, a material passport could be a complete description of all products (staircase, window, furnace, ...), components (iron beam, glass panel, ...), and raw materials (wood, steel, ...), that are present in the building. Ideally, this database would be created during construction and continuously updated. In case an existing building does not yet have a material passport, it can be created through various methods (e.g., plan analysis, digital 3D scanning). A material passport allows the owner of a product/construction to know exactly what it is made of. This is of importance at the end of its useful life, to enable the most effective re-use of the materials. It allows the owner to view a product/construct as a depot, inventory of valuable materials. Furthermore, the process of creating a material passport also shapes the design of the building. The easier the materials can be extracted and re-used on deconstruction of the building, the better. This will lead to an increase of 'recoverable' or 'reversible' buildings, buildings that can be dis-assembled as easily as they were assembled. Another possibility is that a material passport can enable the owner to get better insight into the value of the product/construction. Besides the value of the location and of the space, it could also improve the valuation of the materials used. A higher, or more accurate, valuation of product/construction could be made possible.
Digital Material Passport (DMP) in Industry While early material passports focused on circularity in the built environment, the Digital Material Passport (DMP) has evolved into a universal Statement of Conformity for the industrial materials sector (e.g., steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals and engineering plastics). A Digital Material Passport (DMP) is a machine-readable digital record that describes a material and documents verifiable information about its identity and characteristics across supply chains and lifecycles. A DMP typically includes data on a material’s origin and genealogy, composition, physical and chemical properties, quality and conformance status, and—where relevant—environmental, health, and safety attributes and regulatory approvals. It is designed to enable structured exchange and reuse of material information between organizations and information systems. In many implementations, a DMP is issued per batch, heat, lot, or delivery, and can link requirements (e.g., specifications or regulatory obligations) with declared or measured results (e.g., test outcomes or certificates). Some DMP approaches use cryptographic methods (such as digital signatures and tamper-evident proofs) to provide integrity and attribution of data to a source, supporting audit trails and traceability without requiring a single centralized database.
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