Chapter 1 — full chapter
1.4.4. Standards, interoperability and evolving technology
A passport only delivers value if its data can be read and exchanged across the many organizations that touch a product, and here the ecosystem is still maturing.
There is not yet a single established global standard, and companies work with heterogeneous systems that do not always communicate with one another. In fact, industry analysis drawing on the EU-backed CIRPASS initiative found that around 47% of companies encounter integration difficulties caused by inconsistent data structures, which increases reliance on manual mapping and middleware. Therefore, it is useful to distinguish established building blocks from emerging ones: identification standards such as GS1’s are widely adopted and stable, whereas approaches like blockchain-based traceability remain at the pilot stage and carry their own trade-offs, including energy consumption.
For adopters two risks follow. The first is choosing a solution that later proves incompatible with the final EU requirements or with key partners; the second is vendor lock-in, where data becomes trapped in one provider’s proprietary format. By favoring solutions that follow open, widely used standards and allow data to be exported companies can reduce both risks.