Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome to this workshop co-organized by ITU, the United Nations Environment Programme and ETSI. Thank you to ETSI Director General Mr Luis Jorge Romero for joining us today.
ITU is very pleased to participate in this year’s EU Green Week and to have this opportunity to discuss the digitalization of product information.
The idea of a digital product passport has received significant attention at the European level, most notably through the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan and the Sustainable Product initiative. This is a welcoming step, one that we need to extend to the global level.
Tomorrow, the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability will launch its “Action Plan for a Sustainable Planet in the Digital Age” at Stockholm+50, the international environmental meeting convened by the United Nations. This Action Plan, a follow-up to the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, emphasizes the importance of co-developing digital product passport standards.
ITU, as the UN agency for ICTs, looks forward to playing a leading role in the Action Plan’s proposed Impact Initiative on Digital Public Passports. We believe that with the right approach, such passports can promote sustainable production and consumption, help ICT producers and consumers make more sustainable choices, and scale up circularity across the entire ICT value chain.
Already, ITU green standards provide authentic and proven solutions that are boosting the sustainability performance of ICT, from the famous universal charger solutions to providing methodologies for encouraging circularity design.
Standards will play a significant role in accelerating the implementation of a global digital product passport. ITU has started the development of a new standard that will define the attributes of a digital product passport for the circular economy and its semantic requirements. This standard will directly support manufactures, designers, suppliers and others to take their first step to use a digital product passport for circularity.
There is still much left to be done if we are to scale up the implementation of digital product passports across the entire sector and around the world. For example, the information must be verifiable and machine-readable to enable automatic comparisons between product attributes across different systems. Interoperability is essential to ensure all stakeholders can make use of this information.
Now more than ever, the keywords are collaboration, coordination and cooperation. ITU has been collaborating closely with ETSI Technical Committee on Environmental Engineering to develop technically aligned energy and sustainability standards, with excellent results since 2014. The work on the digital product passport is one of these technically aligned deliverables.
I am pleased that ITU is working very closely with its members to develop this new standard, including the European Commission, ETSI, UNEP and more. We will also continue to collaborate with our sister UN agencies like UN Environment to boost the UN system-wide efforts to fight climate change and improve sustainability.
Next week, we will celebrate World Environment Day. It is an opportunity for us to promote the digital product passport as a powerful tool to address the sustainability challenge.
So we look forward to continuing this very important work together and wish you a very productive and enjoyable workshop.
Thank you.