The Digital Product Passport extends the same evidentiary question from a reporting file to a product. Can the claims attached to an item be traced, corroborated and reconstructed?
Research and planned extension around product-level evidence.
Where CBAM attaches an evidentiary burden to a reporting file, the Digital Product Passport attaches it to a product. The regulatory object changes. the underlying question does not. A claim carried by a product must be traceable to a source, consistent with the other claims attached to the same item, and reconstructable at a later date by a party that was not present when it was made.
A product passport is only as reliable as the infrastructure that populates it. Where passport data is assembled from systems that were never designed to preserve lineage, the passport inherits their limits, and it does so invisibly, because a filled-in field looks the same whether or not it can be backed up.
Product-level evidence is distributed by nature. It originates with suppliers, is transformed through manufacturing, and is asserted at the point of market access. Each transfer is a point at which continuity can break. The evidentiary review therefore concerns not only the values held in a passport, but the continuity of the chain that produced them.
The Digital Product Passport is a designed extension of the WEETRA review architecture, not a current operational use case. The same review objects apply without any structural change. Source documents, declared and recalculated values, critical contradictions and missing critical evidence, and evidence-chain integrity.
WEETRA’s Determination complements these roles by documenting what the reviewed evidence supports within the agreed mandate. Accredited verification, where required, remains the independent statutory function of the verifier. Mandate & Boundaries →
