The BASE Consortium, comprising 19 diverse partners, leads the way in developing the DBP to create a resilient supply chain and enable the implementation of a circular economy. Supported by funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) under grant agreement No 101157200, BASE is contributing to the EU’s ambitious battery regulation goals.

Introduction: Collaboration for a Circular Economy

Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are transforming industries by enhancing transparency, traceability, and circular business models. These innovations align with global sustainability goals by promoting responsible consumption, production, and innovation. A key example is the Digital Battery Passport (DBP), which plays a central role in ensuring the sustainability and circularity of batteries, a critical enabler of the green transition.

EU Battery Regulation: Key Highlights

The EU’s new battery regulation, part of the European Green Deal, supports the transition to climate neutrality by 2050. It ensures batteries are sustainable, safe, and high-performing throughout their lifecycle, covering production, use, and recycling.

The regulation focuses on reducing environmental impact through better recycling, ethical raw materials sourcing, and lower manufacturing carbon footprints. It promotes a circular economy by encouraging battery reuse, repurposing, and waste reduction.

Harmonised EU standards now apply to all battery types, including those for electric vehicles (EVs), light means of transport (LMT) such as e-bikes and e-scooters, and industrial applications. Importantly, starting in February 2027, all batteries over 2 kWh placed on the EU market must include a Digital Battery Passport (DBP), ensuring traceability and transparency throughout their lifecycle.

These rules foster innovation, protect the environment, and enhance the EU’s competitiveness in the global battery market.

Complementing the BASE efforts, Artech International—one of BASE Project’ consortium partners—extends its expertise by contributing to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) initiatives, ensuring the global standardisation of DPPs. As a member of UNECE’s Advisory Board, Artech International is helping ensure that global standards reflect real-world industry needs while aligning with BASE’s overarching goals of promoting sustainability and interoperability.

This involvement further strengthens Artech's commitment to advancing the DPP landscape, both globally and within the European context. By engaging with diverse stakeholders and initiatives, Artech is helping to ensure that DPPs are developed and implemented in a way that maximises their potential benefits for sustainability and circularity.

BASE innovations and UNECE standards: a unified digital future

Being part of the BASE Consortium, Artech is uniquely positioned to contribute to both BASE industry-specific innovations and UNECE’s global standardisation efforts for Digital Product Passports (DPPs). By sharing insights from BASE’s work and actively collaborating with UNECE, Artech ensures that DPP frameworks address real-world industry challenges while aligning with UNECE’s goals for interoperability, sustainability, and traceability. This interactive role allows Artech to facilitate the integration of BASE’s developments within UNECE’s global frameworks, ensuring practical applicability across sectors and regions.

Artech’s contributions to UNECE include:

• Sharing insights from BASE’s development of the DBP to inform UNECE’s strategy for traceability, transparency, and interoperability
• Promoting the adoption of proven frameworks, such as the Product Circularity Data Standard etc. to ensure DPP systems work seamlessly across sectors and jurisdictions
• Contributing to United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP)’s mission to address challenges such as protecting sensitive supply chain information, simplifying compliance with overlapping ESG standards, and fostering interoperability
• Highlighting actionable use cases, particularly in the battery industry, to guide UNECE’s efforts in creating a globally relevant DPP framework

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This alignment ensures that the work being done within BASE resonates on a broader, international scale.

Why UN/CEFACT Standards are Critical

UNECE, through its subsidiary body UN/CEFACT, serves as the focal point within the United Nations for trade facilitation recommendations and electronic business standards. UN/CEFACT’s initiatives, such as the Buy-Ship-Pay Reference Data Model (BSP RDM) and the Product Circularity Data Standard (PCDS), lay the groundwork for globally harmonised DPP systems. These tools enable secure, scalable, and interoperable data exchanges essential for lifecycle traceability and sustainability.

Artech’s participation in UN-ECE ensures that these standards are informed by practical insights from BASE’s DBP development, making them relevant and applicable to industries worldwide.

Harmonising Standards:  Harmonizing Global and industry-driven DPP efforts

The development of UN-ECE standards and BASE's Digital Battery Passport (DBP) are not isolated endeavors, but rather complementary initiatives that leverage each other's strengths to create a unified global approach to Digital Product Passports (DPPs).   

UN-ECE's standards provide the foundational frameworks for key aspects of DPPs, ensuring traceability, transparency, and interoperability across global value chains. BASE leverages these proven frameworks to create sector-specific innovations, like the DBP, which align with specific industry requirements while remaining interoperable with broader international systems.   

Artech’s effort interaction point between UN-ECE and BASE exemplifies a synergistic approach where global standards and industry-specific innovations work together to create a more harmonized and sustainable future.

BASE’ Broader Contribution to Circularity

The UNECE’s UNTP (United Nations Traceability Platform) initiative complements DPPs by addressing greenwashing and promoting verifiable ESG credentials. Key principles include decentralisation, interoperability, and data verifiability, ensuring businesses can compete based on transparent and credible sustainability data. While Artech engages directly with UN-ECE, the BASE Consortium as a whole focuses on ensuring the DBP is a scalable, impactful solution for the battery value chain across the EU and beyond. By integrating traceability, circularity, and compliance features, the DBP serves as a model for industries transitioning to a circular economy.

Artech’s initiative reflects the broader mission of BASE: to align industry innovation with global standards, ensuring that tools like the DBP not only meet regulatory requirements but also drive meaningful change across value chains.

Conclusion: A Shared Vision for Sustainability

The collaboration between BASE and UN-ECE reflects the importance of aligning industry innovations with global standards to drive sustainability and circularity. By building on UN-ECE’s foundational frameworks, BASE is ensuring that tools like the Digital Battery Passport not only meet regulatory requirements but also set a benchmark for traceability, transparency, and global interoperability. Together, BASE, UN-ECE, and other stakeholders are charting a path toward a more sustainable, interconnected future.

BASE is a 3-year long project being under the call ”HORIZON-CL5-2023-D2-02-03: Creating a digital passport to track battery materials, optimise battery performance and life, validate recycling, and promote a new business model based on data sharing (Batt4EU Partnership).” This project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No 101157200.