How do you back a product claim with evidence?
A practical way to connect each product statement to its source document, and to find the gaps before a customer or an authority does.
DPP Shield editorial team · Updated:
Back a product claim by keeping, next to the value itself, the document it came from, who supplied it, the date and the product or batch it covers - and by recording a missing declaration as a gap rather than filling it with an estimate. A claim you cannot trace to a source should not be published.
Why does a claim need a traceable source?
A recycled-content percentage, a repair instruction or a carbon figure is only as good as the evidence behind it. When a customer, a retailer or a market-surveillance authority asks where a figure came from, the answer has to be a document, not a memory.
Passports make this more pressing because they are public, versioned and long-lived. A statement published today can be read years from now, next to the record of when it was made.
What should be recorded with each value?
Four things: the source document or declaration, who provided it, the date or period it covers, and the product, component, material or batch it applies to. Without the last one, a certificate for one supplier's material can quietly end up supporting a different product.
Store the document itself, not only a reference. In this workspace documents are kept with a content hash, so you can later show that the file has not changed since it was attached.
How do you handle missing or uncertain data?
Record the gap. If a supplier has not provided a declaration, the record should say so. Changing the label of an estimate does not turn it into a measured value, and a published passport should make the difference visible.
Where the platform derives a figure, such as a screening carbon estimate from declared materials, it states the basis and the inputs it could not resolve instead of presenting the result as a verified footprint.
How do you check supplier documents against declared values?
Compare what the document says with what was typed into the record: the same substance, the same concentration, the same material and the same validity period. Inconsistencies are common and usually innocent, but they are exactly what an auditor looks for.
Validation findings are a worklist, not a certificate. Resolve them with the people who own the product data, and keep the decision with the record.
When is a claim ready to publish?
When its source is attached, its scope matches the product, open findings are resolved or consciously accepted, and a second person has looked at the public preview. A short review trail is worth more than a polished page with no provenance.