Why Stop at the Digital Product Passport: Should Industrial Waste Have a Passport of Its Own?
Often when you ask a manufacturing site how much waste it produced last month and you will get an answer. Ask what it cost to remove and you will get that too, often to the penny, because somebody had to approve the invoice. Ask where the material came from, why it stopped being useful, and whether anything more sensible could have been done with it, and the conversation slows down. That pause is not a failure of effort. Most engineers I meet care a great deal about the material leaving their site. The difficulty is that our waste records were designed to answer financial and compliance questions, not engineering ones. We know the tonnage. We rarely know the story behind it. What our waste records actually record Waste documentation in most operations serves two purposes: showing that…