Preparing Environmental and Circularity Evidence

Environmental and end-of-life information is among the most evidence-dependent categories in any product passport discussion — and among the least prepared in most factories.

The reason is structural. Composition, supplier and production data are generated by your own operations. Environmental and circularity claims usually depend on information from somewhere else: a mill certificate, a chemical supplier declaration, a test report from a third-party laboratory, a footprint calculation built on assumptions someone else made.

That dependency has two consequences. First, you cannot create this information on demand — you have to know which documents you hold, whether they are current, and whether they are linked to the specific style in question. Second, a claim without its supporting document is worse than no claim, because it invites the reviewer to question everything else you submitted.

The practical starting point is an evidence inventory rather than a data project. For each environmental or circularity field a buyer might ask about, establish three things: do we hold supporting evidence, is it current, and can we retrieve it per style. Fields that fail all three are the ones worth working on — and they are usually fewer than expected, because the evidence often exists somewhere in the organisation and simply is not linked to the product record.

Durability, repairability and end-of-life guidance deserve a separate note. These are forward-looking statements about a product, not records of what happened. They require someone to take responsibility for the statement, which is a governance question rather than a data one.