4TheRecord Podcast: Exploring Digital Product Passports with ClaireFioretti, Head of Standards and Regulations at Michelin

[Music] Dear Digital Product Passport community, welcome to today's episode of the For the Record Podcast. For the record is a digital product passport consultancy agency that helps institutions and industry players to develop and implement their DPP strategy. Today I am joined by Claire Fioretti, head of standards and regulations at Michelin, one of the world's largest tire manufacturers. Tires are among the very first product segments where digital product passports will become mandatory under the working plan of the eco-design for sustainable product circulation. That makes this conversation especially timely. With Claire, we'll dive into Michelin's role in shaping the path towards a circular economy, the circularity potential of tires from retrading to recycling them back into a pyrolysis oil. They work on digital product passports including contributions to the GDSO, the global data space for tires, Michelin's pilot in the EU funded project Surpass 2 and finally Claire's vision for the DPP over the next decade. I wish you an informative entertainment. Welcome to the podcast Digital Product Passport Insights. My name is Susanne Goodolowski and I'm the founder and CEO of For the Record, a digital product passport consultancy agency. My guest today, well known in the DPP ecosystem, is the wonderful Claire Fioretti, head of standards and regulations for connected mobility at Michelin. Welcome Claire, it's an honor to have you on the show today. Thank you very much Susanne, thank you for the nice introduction. It's true, you're welcome. Claire, please introduce yourself and your role at Michelin. Okay, so as you said, my name is Claire Fioretti. And Michelin, I lead our strategy for norms and regulations related to connected mobility and connected tires. I'm also active in ETRMA's connected mobility initiatives. I'm also chairing task force within the GDSO focused on tire lifecycle data services. And additionally, I contribute to the European DPP standardization effort through the Sentinel-HGTC24 just as you, Susanne. Claire, you've mentioned a lot of things that we also get to later. But first of all, I know that Michelin is heavily committed to pave the way for a more sustainable future. Please tell us about the project at Michelin, which are focusing on the circular economy. In circular economy, so in fact, Michelin is convinced that the digitization of the circular economy will contribute to reducing the environmental footprint of tires and that for several reasons. The first one for end users, if we connect systematically the tire to the Internet, they will be able to benefit more systematically, also, from tires as a service offers, which are known to make tires last longer. So this is one important benefit of this digitization. Second, you know that we are still retweeting about 25% of truck casing in Europe. So retweeting means that we've changed the thread pattern of the tire after one life after it turns out. And having access to the casing history will help retreaders to improve their diagnostic for retweighability. And as a consequence, we'll help save casing to be retreadable. Of course, there will also be benefits for tire manufacturers themselves because thanks to traceability, they can access tire performance at end-of-life, they can understand recycling patterns, they can improve design and better promote the sustainable performance of their tires. But the real game changer of this digitization is in developing new recycling channels. Because what's important is to close the loop regarding material circularity, if we really want to achieve this circular economy. And to do that, we need to industrialize recycling ensuring compliance and competitiveness for the sector. And that starts with qualifying the west feedstock that is entering the recycling plants. So with traceability and composition, tire composition data, recyclers like pyrolyzerz, for instance, can control input quality, guarantee the material origin, and they integrate easily outputs into the economy as secondary role material. So the tire industry has started to standardize important building blocks since 2016 that will contribute to the circular economy digitization. Like, for instance, the tire embedded RFID standards, that are relying on the rain technology, but also the tire industry data space, the famous GDSO, I was talking about in my presentation. Yes. That stands for global data service organization for tires. Thank you for that. Claire, not everyone is familiar with the GDSO, or maybe do you want to introduce the organization very quickly? Yes, sure. So the GDSO was created in 2022. Its first objective was sharing data in a standard manner around connected tires. It was funded by the five largest tire manufacturers, and now we have about 90 members. And the GDSO is in fact the data space of the tire industry. So within the GDSO, we are currently developing new services to enable retailers and end-of-life tire collectors to update each tire history. This is a new tire life cycle data service. And the idea behind this service is to integrating data exchange with downstream value chain. Tire manufacturers in this service, tire manufacturers will provide information about the new tire. Retraders and TLD collectors will provide declaration after retreat after recycling. But managing this or allowing this kind of change is very challenging. Because usually, as a manufacturer, you have no commercial relationship with all repairers, refurbishers of your product. As it is usually the case with your upstream superiors. So in that context, the data space features of the GDSO is very important. And we are going to test this new service, this data space features, in the surface-to-project, asking an ambulance for the DPP for tire. Yes, we're coming to the next favorite topics of mine, which is the Surface-to-project. We had podcasts series about Surface-to-lately. And it was presented by Karolien Bernier, what Surface-to-is, or for the interested listener, please go to the previous podcasts and you find it there. Just in short recap, Surface-to-is-an-EU-funded project that is coordinating 13 pilots in different product categories, such as textiles and tires, to evaluate tools, IT systems, and processes required to implement the digital product passport framework and system in an interoperable way. And I know clear that you're leading one of these pilots there. So can you tell us a little bit more about your work, your goals, your outcome, I don't know, with that exciting project? I will try, you know, on this topic that you could speak very, very long time. So I will try to make it short. Yeah, you will have time. So you understand Michelin is convinced of this digitization of all the benefits of digitizing the circular economy. And by joining Surface-to, we wanted to demonstrate that this digitization was possible and we wanted to test how DPP data will change the business, in fact. So the pilot we are managing, the tire DPP pilot, is first leveraging the high number of torque and passenger car tires with embedded RFID inside that are already on the market at the Michelin brand. The pilot takes place in three different European countries, France, Germany, and Sweden, with three different market organizations for end-of-life tire management. And that's also important to test these different business expectations in such a pilot. So also gathering key stakeholders of the circular economy ecosystem of the tyron. We have tyron manufacturers, of course. We have truck-casing collectors. What's that? What collectors? Truck-casing collectors, you know, it's when you, as a fleet, you have used your tyron. So the tyron is well out. And now you have some experts, often working with the traders, that came to analyze the tyrons that have been dismounted for your vehicle, and to check whether they can be retreaded or not. So these are case-in collectors. Truck-casing collectors. Ah, thank you. You see? So you imagine, for them, if they just scan the tyron and they immediately see what was the previous life. And immediately access information related to the previous life of the product, how it will change their life. OK. This is the product that sports may do at the end. So this will really benefit their life. So case-in collectors, traders, producer-responsibility organisms, end-of-life-tire collectors, recyclers, and recyclers that are involved in entire pyrolysis, that is, in Europe, one process to recover material from tyrons that can be re-incorporated in tyrons after one. So here we have targeting close loop for safety. And in the pilot, we have one of our partners, Regom, that will provide fully automated solution to sort end-of-life-tire based on RFID reading and access to people information. And we need to sort end-of-life-tire. And if we want to build these homogenous batches of material, West material, that will enter pyrolysis plant to be transformed into recycled carbon black or new oil. And what I was explaining before, we need to better control, peerlesser needs to better control the input material. So this is why accessing data will help also doing that, and you imagine automating the sorting process is also very, very important. Absolutely. In the pilot, we also have the GDSO that will enable data exchanges between all these actors. And we have also JS1 that will just play his role of identifying receiving agency. What can we expect from this experience? It's very, very exciting experience, this pilot. So the pilot will stop by 2027, and the idea is to have first very robust proof of concept of the DPP system that will be very helpful for the implementation by 2029 in the tire value chain. Second, we expect to have an idea of the transformations that will lead the end-of-life-tire management and a recycling business in the next tenure for a true circularity of materials. Third, outcomes will be evidence of how traceability will abreast the retread business and convince fits to choose more sustainable tire runs. And finally, we expect to have enough fordable, implementable DPP based on tangible standards that can really be implemented, as well as a pragmatic delegated act for tires in the regulation. So thank you for that. It's so impressive. What you already do and have done before we even had a regulation, also the GDSO is not new. So there's already been an initiative before the regulator came and asked for this. And it's so impressive how to see that already today, tires are being, you know, transformed into new tires again by refurbishing, retreading, or by, you know, making oil again from those tires, or have other usage forms of oil tires, it's super impressive, very important project. In the last section, you mentioned that it has to be affordable and that you're using rain as a data carrier. Some people would probably say that this is not affordable. Can you explain why rain was the right choice for you? So, yeah, it's a matter of cost-benefit analysis, the choice of rain. You can imagine that choosing a data carrier that is able to last as long as the product itself, this is a requirement, in fact, of the DPP regulation, to have a persistent, electronic identification of the product during their life cycle, so that the data is still accessible when it arrives in recycling facilities, so to do that in a product such as a tire that is made out of rubber that is submitted to high temperature, to pressure, to a lot of deformation during its life, it was a big, big research and development challenge. So today, the choice of rain, RFID, to identify electrical tires, and that result in four ISO standards published in 2020, to describe how to embed RFID and what we need to store in RFID to achieve this unique identification of products, this was a result of several criteria. First, of course, we needed an identifier that is surviving all the tire life constructs, as I said. Second, embedded RFID is waterproof, meaning you can really prove that the rain RFID that is embedded in the tire has been embedded by the original manufacturer, and that's important in the future. Second, RFID are readable in all circumstances. You imagine a tire while driving, you imagine it's within by pile, so a bunch of tires can be read immediately, it can be read from sorting chains, it can be read in dark environments, you don't need extra light or specific light to access information stored in the RFID. RFID is fully recyclable, as any other tire components, the rain technology is fully recyclable, that was also an important choice criteria. Of course, so that we can trace all the experience of the life cycle. We can store inside the RFID just what is necessary, so we can reduce it to the minimum necessary to identify the tire, thanks also to the link between a rain and GS1. And at the end, this tire identification scheme, we'll call it like that, can be associated to flexible resolution mechanisms, meaning you can associate the tire identified this way to different databases, depending on certain constraints that we may see arriving in the industry, if different DPP systems are put in place, such as Europe and tomorrow in China. So for us today's really the rain RFID is the only standard technology that is available to convey information until the end of life of the tire at a reasonable cost and flexible enough to adapt to this future system that we need to have in mind. Super interesting points, thank you for sharing this clear. It's also interesting, which is say about the resolution mechanisms or linking the number to the digital product passports, maybe of these different systems. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, because it's usually very complicated to understand how to get from the digital identifier to the digital product passports, and doing that on a serialized basis? I will try Susan, I will probably oversimplify the problem, but just trying to make it understandable and try also to explain why it is important to have that in mind when you choose your identification scheme in the future digital product passports system. So today in the rain RFID, we just have the serial number of the tires that is stored, so a number. This is not a web link, it's not a web address. [BLANK_AUDIO] de résolution de mécanismes, tu build ce data-based address to which the data of this thierre are linked, tu build this link, and it's very easy to do, because the GS1 standard, the identification standard, digital link, in fact, the lowest you do that, and depending on the domain name you are going to use to build this link, you can attach the same thierre with the same RFID inside to different databases. For instance, imagine that if we have geographical constraints to localize data in the European DPP system, and tomorrow in the Chinese DPP system, we will need to have two different databases to manage this two DPP systems. Either we have to put inside the thierre the specific link, depending on where the thierre is going to be sold, okay, so we need to know far in advance that this thierre is going to be sold in Europe, and this one is going to be in China, or in this increased complexity, in fact, in the production plant, or if you are using the system, the ID scheme we are using here in the thierre industry, you just have to have two different resolvers, one for the Chinese DPP and another one for the European DPP and to manage the complexity in the cloud. Yeah, not in the data carrier. So thank you very much for that insight from such a big player as you are. Now, you are already involved in digital product passport projects for a long time. We both know each other for some time. Where do you see the digital product passport in five years, or maybe in ten years, could you give us your vision of where we are with this? In ten years, potentially, because it will take some time to run, but let's make a little bit. So, first of all, we don't want the digital product passport to be a kind of digital level attached to the product. We really want to have a system that is tracing events, valuable events during the life cycle and that enable data sharing with different professional stakeholders so that it improves their business operation. So, we can say that we want the DPP to be the enabler of a true sustainable and circular economy, helping businesses to build proofs of sustainability of their activity all along the product life cycle, and really closing the loop regarding material circularity, by transforming the recycling business into an industrial business of the market economy, compliant with regulation and competition. And this is not possible to achieve the transformation of the linear economy at scale without such a standard tool as a DPP. Because we can simply not manage the data exchange volume, if they stay in proprietary formats and without the standard product flexibility. Behind that, I'm saying that if we really want to achieve this transformation at scale, once again, the important word is at scale. You cannot still manage your information flow by hand via excel sheet, it's no longer possible. The risk of error is too enormous and now really it's, we can renounce to that. So, as long as we go in this direction and we expect we have been into this direction of really automation of data transfer, this is the promote of the DPP, otherwise it will be more difficult to achieve this transformation of the economy. Yes, thank you very much of your vision. And I'm sharing that by saying, if we professionalise the recycling and refurbishing of products in the same way as we professionalise the building of the product, we will have a true circular economy and the digital product passports and rain as a data carrier will help us in this transformation. And I think Michelin is an excellent player in running in front of everyone. So, thank you again for your time, for all your engagement in this area. Claire, you're a game changer and I'm looking forward to seeing you soon in person again. Thank you for the interview. Thank you very much, Susan.