How to handle bulk commodities

Created by: onthebreeze

Impacted sections

Might need a new section under "best practices" heading?

• https://spec-untp-fbb45f.opensource.unicc.org/docs/specification/DigitalProductPassport

Issue Description

How to handle identification of bulk commodities - and how discovery works for bulk commodities. There are some quite detailed classification schemes for commodity products. For example

• https://grainsaustralia.com.au/master-lists/wheat-variety-list for wheat varieties
• https://chem.echa.europa.eu/100.013.804/overview?searchText=lithium%20hydroxide (big EU chemicals database, LiOH example)
• https://www.oiv.int/what-we-do/viticulture-database-report?oiv=
• and lots more.

Sometimes these category schemes just identify the commodity (eg lithium hydroxide) and sometimes they also add a region and year. Sometimes a specific commodity is uniquely identifiable by URI, sometimes it's just a row in a table in a PDF.

For UNTP we want to empower producers of the same variety of thing (eg a type of wheat or a type of mineral concentrate) to differentiate their sustainability performance vs a nearby competitor producing the same commodity. So I think the granularity we need in bulk commodity identification is to include 3 dimensions:

• The commodity type (ie a value in a formal classification scheme) - eg Lithium spodumene ore
• The facility ID that produced the commodity (farm, mine-site, factory) -
• The period of production (I guess the year will usually be good enough).

So for example a single commodity product DPP would describe:

• Iron Ore, from Jimblebar minesite, 2024 production. or
• Chenin Blanc grapes, from Mystic park vineyard, 2023 vintage. or
• Sorghum wheat (some sub-type) from bindi-bindi farm, 2024 harvest.

Challenge is that there is likely no universal commodity classification scheme and there are no universal facility identifiers. So it'll be a messy space.

Then this production of a given commodity from a given facility in a given year will likely get bundled up into several logistics shipments / consignments which will most likely have a resolvable identifier such as a GS1 SSCC or GINC.

Regarding discovery (aligning with the UNTP idea that if you have an ID of a thing then you should be able to get data about a thing), I'd expect that the bulk product DPP would be resolved in one of three ways

• via the logistics unit - got consignment ID and find the products
• via the facility ID - find the commodity types produced
• via a unique id generated and shared for the commodity/facility/period triplet - maybe a DID?