TWIN-TECH – Twin Transition for VET Resilience
Project number: 2025-1-SI01-KA220-VET-000360870
Program: Erasmus+ KA220-VET
Project website: twin-tech.eu
Most products travel from the factory to the point of consumption without conveying much useful information about their past. The country of origin, manufacturer and materials used are often the only things to come out of the box. However, the production, repair, reuse and recycling of products are all processes that are accompanied by a lot of information.
The European Union is developing a Digital Product Passport (DP.bgP) in order to record the environmental information of products throughout their entire life cycle.
This digital record contains information on the product’s materials, its environmental impact, the maintenance, repair, re-use and recycling possibilities of the product.
Depending on the product type the information in the digital record can be retrieved by manufacturers, repair companies, recyclers, authorities and consumers.
From policy to implementation – the EU digital product passport registry is online From July 2026, the European Commission’s EU digital product passport registry will record, among others, unique product identifiers needed to create digital product passports as well as other relevant information for connecting products with their digital counterparts.
The batteries will be the first product group to face the big test. As of 18 February 2027, batteries will need to carry a digital product passport. This will apply to all kinds of batteries, such as those used in electric vehicles, light means of transport and industrial applications. Other product groups will subsequently be added to the list of products that require a digital product passport. However, these products will be specified on a product-by-product basis.
It looks at first glance as if a new, bureaucratic, complex administrative instrument is being introduced, but in reality something more profound for the industry is happening.
When a battery’s “first life” comes to an end, the information about the materials in the battery that a recycler would like to have is often not readily available. A repair company may also want to have access to technical product information. Companies which want to give a product a second life want to know the history of the product, in order to assess its current condition. The requirements of environmental, green and sustainability policies need to be monitored and enforced.
A digital product passport is meant to make the information of a product’s history easily accessible.
But, interestingly, the greening of industries and the digitalization of processes go hand-in-hand. Firstly, the need for better data to increase recycling rates and assess environmental performance of products across their whole lifecycle. Secondly, most repairs of products will need information about components and their respective maintenance.
All workers will be impacted in different ways by the implementation of the digital product passport. The production technician will need to be able to input the material information into the records. The warehouse worker will use product IDs to track products and work with product tracking systems. The repair technician will need to be able to read the information from the digital records as well as physically inspect the part. Recyclers will rely on product information before disassembling a product for recycling.
There is no need for these employees to become developers of software in order to work with the necessary digital tools for environmental purposes.
The connection between green and digital skills is a main theme in the work of TWIN-TECH. In our research so far, we have found that in many cases, ‘green’ and ‘digital’ skills are not developed as separate skill sets but rather in combination. This means that in addition to skills related to energy efficiency, circular production, resource management and sustainable design, workers will also need to familiarize themselves with related data collection, monitoring and digitalization skills.
By connecting all sustainable aspects of a physical product the digital product passport makes it clear that sustainable production increasingly also depends on information related to the product that needs to be managed by the workforce.
In order to work with products, a particular knowledge about the information, that is connected to the physical object, must be acquired by students in the vocational education and training.
Under the Erasmus+ framework, TWIN-TECH enables vocational education and training institutions, enterprises and training providers from all over Europe to prepare for future challenges together. For now, however, sustainability in production requires people to work with products and product-related data.
