It's advised to use the latest maintained release from the list of maintained releases.
Impact
Please note that this specification is suitable for pre-production pilot implementations.
Informative
UNTP delivers value beyond technical interoperability. By making supply chain data verifiable and tamper-evident, it addresses two broad classes of challenges that depend on trustworthy information: the security and resilience of supply chains themselves (provenance integrity, concentration risk, sanctions exposure, recall speed), and the sustainability of what those supply chains produce (environmental footprint, human rights, circular economy, ESG reporting). The sections below draw on independent research and regulatory analysis to describe what UNTP makes possible in each domain.
Security and Resilience Outcomes
| Impact Domain | UNTP Contribution |
|---|---|
| Anti-Corruption | Verifiable material and money flow data lets regulators, investigators, and civil society detect irregularities, identify high-risk actors, and expose record manipulation. |
| Counterfeit Detection and Product Authenticity | Cryptographically signed chain-of-custody records bound to physical product identifiers make counterfeits detectable at every handoff instead of only in post-incident forensics. |
| Critical Minerals and Strategic Material Security | Verifiable origin and processing records let governments and manufacturers track exposure to strategic-material supply risk and demonstrate compliance with critical-minerals sourcing rules. |
| Recall, Contamination, and Incident Response | Traceability graphs combined with verifiable credential revocation turn recalls from broadcast notices into targeted, evidence-based operations that complete in hours rather than weeks. |
| Sanctions, Export Controls, and Trade-Compliance Automation | Identity-anchored supply chain graphs let automated tooling screen the entire upstream for sanctioned actors and export-control violations at credential-issuance time, not only at the shipping manifest. |
| Supply Chain Disruption and Concentration Risk | N-tier visibility through linked credentials exposes single-source and geographic concentration dependencies, supporting government and industry contingency planning. |
Sustainability Outcomes
| Impact Domain | UNTP Contribution |
|---|---|
| Biodiversity Loss | Traceability to source enables accurate ecological footprint assessment and reduces the risk of hidden deforestation or illegal resource extraction in deeper supply chain tiers. |
| Circular Economy | Verified product composition, sourcing, and life history data supports accurate recyclability claims, better design decisions, and responsible material recovery. |
| Human Rights / Welfare | Supply chain traceability gives companies and regulators the evidence needed to identify and mitigate forced labour and human rights risks at scale. |
| Product Transparency | Standardised, independently validated ESG and supply chain data lets buyers assess environmental and social impact, authenticity, and compliance with confidence. |
| Reducing Greenwashing | An immutable audit trail behind every sustainability claim exposes misrepresentation and replaces marketing narratives with machine-verifiable evidence. |
| Sustainability Standards Alignment | UNTP data maps directly to CSRD, CSDDD, IFRS, SASB, and GRI, reducing audit complexity and ensuring consistent disclosures across jurisdictions. |
| Verifiable ESG Performance Data | High-integrity, tamper-evident ESG data gives financial institutions, investors, and NGOs a common, reliable basis for risk assessment, portfolio analysis, and advocacy. |
Anti-Corruption
UNTP enhances traceability and trackability, enabling analysis of money and material flows and identification of potential corruption.
By standardising how information is verified and shared, UNTP makes it harder for organisations to conceal unethical practices and easier for regulators, investors, and partners to detect irregularities. This strengthened integrity improves trust across transactions, supports compliance with anti-corruption regulations, and fosters a business environment where ethical behaviour is verifiable rather than assumed.
Where reliable data exists, companies and law enforcement, journalists, and civil society can overlay core traceability information with additional sources as part of anti-corruption due diligence:
- Data on a raw material's origin, processing, and transit can be overlaid with indicators on rule of law, corruption perceptions, and minerals sector governance to identify vulnerabilities and assess the reliability of government-issued documents.
- Chain of custody information can be combined with contracts and beneficial ownership data to identify high-risk actors — Politically Exposed Persons, military or police involvement, beneficial owners with criminal backgrounds, or companies lacking operational or financial qualifications.
- Plausibility checks on production and trade volumes, alongside contractual terms, can reveal discrepancies that signal record manipulation, underreporting, or other corrupt practices.
Source: From Mine to Market: Using Traceability to Fight Mineral Sector Corruption
Biodiversity Loss
The World Economic Forum estimates that over 50% of global GDP depends on nature and the services it provides. Supply chain transparency for biodiversity means disclosing the origin of raw materials and associated ecological impacts throughout a company's value chain — covering not only direct suppliers but also upstream producers and the specific geographical areas from which nature-dependent commodities are sourced. High transparency is a core requirement for credible environmental reporting within ESG.
Achieving transparency requires implementing traceability systems such as UNTP to map and verify the origin of materials. Companies must collect and standardise data on land use, water consumption, and pollution at each stage of the supply chain, with regular third-party verification of both the data and the system's integrity.
This enables consumers, investors, and regulators to accurately assess a company's ecological footprint and hold it accountable for its nature-related commitments. Transparency also mitigates the risk of hidden deforestation or illegal resource extraction in deeper supply chain tiers and builds trust by providing verifiable evidence of responsible sourcing.
Source: Supply Chain Transparency for Biodiversity
Circular Economy
The content, composition, and life history of a product are essential for assessing reuse pathways and engineering effective recovery and separation of raw materials or components. UNTP enhances the availability and comprehensiveness of this information through the product passport.
UNTP strengthens circular economy initiatives by providing verifiable, traceable data on product materials, sourcing, reuse cycles, and end-of-life pathways. Standardising how circularity metrics are recorded and validated lets businesses, consumers, and regulators track a product's lifecycle with confidence and ensure that claims about recyclability, reuse, or resource efficiency are accurate and tamper-evident. This transparency supports better design decisions, promotes responsible material recovery, and encourages markets to reward genuinely circular products.
Counterfeit Detection and Product Authenticity
Counterfeit products cause an estimated USD 2 trillion in annual global economic damage and cause direct physical harm when they infiltrate pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, aerospace components, automotive safety parts, or food. Existing anti-counterfeiting measures — holograms, watermarks, tamper-evident packaging — are passive physical markers that can be copied or replicated. Supply chain audits and market surveillance catch counterfeits only after they surface, not before.
UNTP reframes product authenticity as a runtime cryptographic check. Each legitimate product carries a signed credential chain that binds it to its issuer, its facility of origin, its production batch, and any subsequent transformation or custody events. Physical identifiers such as GS1 Digital Link, DataMatrix codes, and NFC tags resolve to the signed credential rather than to a static database record. A counterfeit item either carries no credential, carries a credential that does not cryptographically chain back to a legitimate issuer, or attempts to reuse a valid credential on multiple items — each of which fails verification at scan time. For high-value and safety-critical goods, this converts authenticity from a periodic audit question into a per-item, per-handoff check.
Source: OECD / EUIPO Global Trade in Fakes 2021; US Drug Supply Chain Security Act.
Critical Minerals and Strategic Material Security
A secure and resilient supply of critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, rare earths, graphite, and similar — has become a central pillar of industrial policy in the EU, US, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Korea. Regulations such as the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, the US Inflation Reduction Act and Defense Production Act provisions, and Australia's Critical Minerals Strategy set domestic-content thresholds, "trusted partner" sourcing preferences, and restrictions on material originating from high-risk jurisdictions. Meeting these rules at industrial scale requires proof of where materials came from, who processed them, and under what governance — a form of evidence that voluntary assurances and manual audits cannot sustain.
UNTP provides the infrastructure for that evidence. Digital Product Passports carry verifiable origin and refinement history; Digital Facility Records anchor processing sites to identifiers that regulators can cross-check; Digital Conformity Credentials link claims to accredited third-party assessments. Buyers can demonstrate compliance with trusted-partner and domestic-content rules at the moment of procurement. Governments can audit aggregate national exposure to single-source or adversarial-aligned suppliers without requiring confidential disclosures from individual firms. Upstream producers benefit from a verifiable premium for sovereign-compliant material in markets that previously could not distinguish it.
Source: EU Critical Raw Materials Act (Regulation 2024/1252); US Inflation Reduction Act §30D; Australia's Critical Minerals Strategy 2023–2030.
Human Rights / Welfare
Governments worldwide have introduced regulations against modern slavery and human rights violations. Companies must treat supply chain transparency and ethical sourcing as both a legal obligation and a moral duty. Legislation increasingly requires firms not only to avoid profiting from forced labour but to actively report and mitigate any risks of it in their production and sourcing.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) member states mandated the development of Recommendation 49 — Transparency at Scale: Fostering Sustainable Value Chains — to advance the circular and digital transformations for sustainable development. This reflects a growing consensus on the importance of responsible, equitable, and interoperable data governance for achieving development objectives, safeguarding human rights, fostering innovation, and driving economic growth.
UNTP supports governments and industry with practical measures by implementing supply chain traceability and transparency at the scale needed to achieve meaningful sustainability outcomes.
Product Transparency: B2C Consumers and B2B End Users
UNTP provides comprehensive information on the composition and sourcing of materials used to design and manufacture a product, giving buyers access to environmental, social, and sustainability credentials.
By linking product claims to standardised, independently validated ESG and supply chain data, UNTP enables buyers to assess environmental and social impact, authenticity, and compliance with confidence. This reduces misinformation, strengthens trust in sustainability labels, and empowers consumers and businesses to make procurement decisions aligned with their values, regulatory requirements, and risk expectations.
Recall, Contamination, and Incident Response
Supply chain resilience depends not only on preventing incidents but on responding quickly when they occur. Food contamination, pharmaceutical defects, battery safety issues, compromised electronic components, and cyber-physical attacks all share a common response problem: identifying exactly which batches are affected, which parties currently hold them, and which downstream products contain them. Today this typically takes weeks of manual supplier outreach, during which affected goods continue to circulate and consumer trust erodes.
UNTP enables targeted response through two mechanisms working together. The Digital Traceability Event log maintains a verifiable record of every production, movement, and transformation event linked to the Digital Product Passports involved — so downstream holders can be identified by graph traversal rather than by phone calls. The W3C Bitstring Status List built into UNTP's credential model lets the original issuer revoke or flag affected credentials in a single action; holders that check credential status routinely see the revocation propagate within minutes. The combination converts a recall from a broadcast notice to the entire industry into a targeted operation that identifies affected parties by name and scopes the response to actual exposure.
Source: WHO Good Traceability Practices for Medical Products; FDA Food Safety Modernization Act Rule 204.
Reducing Greenwashing
UNTP ensures traceability across sourcing, checking, and confirming — or refuting — the claims of product manufacturers and distributors.
UNTP reduces greenwashing by requiring that sustainability claims be backed by verifiable information. Data is recorded, validated, and shared with an immutable audit trail that exposes inconsistencies and prevents companies from misrepresenting their impact. This builds trust among investors, financial institutions, regulators, and civil society, who can rely on machine-verifiable evidence rather than marketing narratives.
Sanctions, Export Controls, and Trade-Compliance Automation
Sanctions regimes — OFAC, EU restrictive measures, UK financial sanctions, UN Security Council lists, and sectoral export controls under frameworks such as ITAR, EAR, and the Wassenaar Arrangement — are both more numerous and more dynamic than ever before. Most current compliance tooling operates at the shipment level: screening a single counterparty on a single transaction. That approach misses upstream exposure. A finished product's tier-3 supplier can be sanctioned without any direct relationship to the ultimate buyer; by the time the exposure surfaces in an audit, product has already been delivered and the buyer is liable.
UNTP's Digital Identity Anchor binds legal entities, beneficial owners, and facilities to globally resolvable identifiers. Because every credential in a UNTP supply chain graph cites those identifiers, automated tooling can traverse the complete upstream of any product passport and screen every referenced party against sanctions and restricted-party lists. The check happens at credential issuance, at procurement, or continuously — not only at the shipping manifest. The same mechanism supports export-control end-use and end-user verification, and provides the audit trail regulators increasingly expect as evidence of "knowing your extended supply chain."
Source: OFAC Compliance Guidance; EU Dual-Use Regulation 2021/821; G7 statements on trusted supply chains.
Supply Chain Disruption and Concentration Risk
Supply chain disruption — from natural disaster, pandemic, conflict, infrastructure failure, or deliberate economic coercion — reveals hidden dependencies only after they bite. The pandemic exposed single-source semiconductor and active-pharmaceutical-ingredient concentration; the 2021 Suez Canal blockage exposed routing fragility; more recent events have exposed concentration of rare-earth processing, mature-node chips, critical agricultural inputs, and maritime shipping insurance. In every case, buyers and governments discovered after the fact that a dependency they believed to be diversified actually converged at a single upstream node.
UNTP makes those dependencies visible before the disruption. Each product passport links to the facility record for its production site, which in turn links to input-material passports, which link to their own upstream facility and input records, and so on recursively. The result is an N-tier dependency graph that buyers, governments, and industry associations can analyse for geographic concentration, single-source exposure, and shared-upstream risk that cascades across seemingly independent suppliers. Unlike private mapping services that capture only what one buyer can see, UNTP is distributed and cross-referencing: every participating actor contributes a verifiable piece of the graph, and any actor with the appropriate credential access links can walk it. This is the shape of evidence that national resilience reviews, industrial policy, and insurance underwriting have increasingly needed but struggled to obtain.
Source: OECD Supply Chain Resilience Policy Handbook 2024; US National Security Council supply chain resilience reports.
Sustainability Standards: CSRD, CSDDD, IFRS, SASB, and GRI
UNTP provides access to product information and verified credentials from supply chain actors. This information maps directly to sustainability standards including CSRD, CSDDD, IFRS, SASB, and GRI, allowing organisations to report ESG data in a verifiable, interoperable, and tamper-evident format.
By linking these major standards to a common transparency layer, UNTP improves data reliability, reduces audit costs and complexity, and ensures consistent disclosures across jurisdictions and frameworks.
Verifiable ESG Performance Data for Financial Institutions, Investors, and NGOs
UNTP provides a traceability framework covering a comprehensive set of verified credentials along the value chain, giving all actors access to high-integrity, tamper-evident ESG data.
Financial institutions gain clearer insight into risk and compliance. Investors benefit from comparable, independently validated metrics for more accurate portfolio analysis. NGOs gain a transparent evidence base to hold companies accountable and strengthen advocacy. By establishing a common, verifiable standard for ESG performance, UNTP aligns all stakeholders around credible, data-driven sustainability action.