Glass that speaks: Tracing the future with Saint-Gobain
Digital product passports are gaining traction across the construction sector as a way to trace materials, improve recycling rates and enable more circular business models. At Saint-Gobain Glass, the concept ties directly into ongoing efforts to reduce waste and support a circular economy – but the path forward is not without its complexities.
For Saint-Gobain Glass, traceability is already a natural part of operations. The company follows international standards such as ISO 9000 and ISO 14000, ensuring that every sheet of flat glass can be traced through the production chain. Each large pane is marked with a small QR code in one corner, providing tracking data alongside the information attached to the packaging. This includes details about minor surface defects that can be optimized away in the next production step — a practical measure that helps reduce material waste.
While traceability systems are well established, digital product passports (DPPs) could add new value for the industry. However, as a producer of raw materials rather than finished products, Saint-Gobain Glass sees the most immediate benefits for manufacturers further down the chain.
— A window with a digital product passport, perhaps using RFID, could provide information about where to find spare parts and how to recycle different components at the end of life. It could also include all the window’s performance data, especially from the insulating glass, to support reuse, says Oskar Storm, Architectural Projects Specification Manager at Saint-Gobain Glass.
One of the biggest challenges in achieving circularity lies in the recycling stage. Although flat glass can be recycled into new flat glass at a rate of up to 95 percent, less than one percent is currently reused in this way. The missing link, according to Saint-Gobain, is not technical capability but information flow. Accurate data about the composition and origin of glass is crucial to ensure it ends up in the right recycling streams. This is where initiatives like SwePass can make a difference. Saint-Gobain Glass is an active member of the SwePass working group, contributing expertise and supporting the mapping of material flows.
— Our partnership in SwePass is about raising awareness and building a market. We want stakeholders to feel a sense of ‘landfill shame’ when they choose not to recycle windows. At the same time, we need to define new circularity metrics — today there’s no real reward for those who take on the extra cost of recycling, says Oskar Storm.
Saint-Gobain’s collaboration with Ragn-Sells illustrates this commitment in practice. The recycling company has invested heavily in circular flat glass recovery, and Saint-Gobain guarantees to purchase all the material they can process — a step toward real circular value chains. Despite growing enthusiasm, the implementation of digital product passports in the glass industry remains at an early stage. There is still uncertainty around definitions and standards, and progress will depend on alignment across the value chain. For Saint-Gobain, the key to widespread adoption lies in policy and certification frameworks that make digital product passports a requirement rather than an option. In the meantime, initiatives like SwePass and Trace4Value provide a vital platform for collaboration, allowing companies to test concepts, exchange knowledge and gradually turn circular ambitions into tangible practice.
