Digital Product Passports

The European Union is moving to require Digital Product Passports across a wide range of goods. If you make, sell or distribute physical products into the EU market, this is worth understanding now rather than when the deadline is close.

What is a Digital Product Passport

A Digital Product Passport is a persistent digital record attached to a physical product. It travels with the product through its entire life, from manufacture through sale, use and eventually disposal or recycling. The record is accessed through a QR code, barcode or similar identifier on the product itself.

The data it carries will depend on the product category, but the core intention is consistent: give everyone who handles that product the information they need. Where did the materials come from? Can this be repaired, and how? What happens to it at end of life?

This is meaningfully different from existing labelling or certification schemes. It is not a static badge. It is a live, structured data record linked to a specific product, designed to be machine-readable as well as human-readable.

Do I need to know about them

DPPs are being introduced under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which was formally adopted in July 2024. The rollout is phased by product category. Batteries are first, with mandatory passports required from February 2027. Textiles, furniture and tyres follow later that year, with electronics and further categories expected through to 2030. The scope will broaden considerably over time.

If your business sells into the EU, the regulation applies to you regardless of where you are based. If you are a UK business with European customers, that is not a reason to look away.

What is required

The compliance demands are more significant than they might first appear. You will need clean, structured data at the product level, not just aggregate sustainability figures or supplier assurances, but specific information about individual products. That data will need to live somewhere it can be accessed reliably, updated when things change and surfaced through a physical identifier on the product.

For most businesses, this means looking hard at existing data infrastructure. Product information is often fragmented across ERP systems, supplier records and spreadsheets that do not talk to each other. Getting it into a form that can support a passport will take real work.

The businesses that will find this manageable are the ones that start the data work early, well before their sector deadline arrives.

The part worth paying attention to

The minimum data fields are being set by regulation, but the layer above that is entirely open. A product passport can also carry repair guides, warranty information, resale links, authenticity verification or sustainability credentials that go well beyond what is legally required.

Early pilots have already shown the range of what is possible. A winter jacket whose passport doubles as a ski-lift pass. Trainers with a direct link into the resale market. Appliances that surface repair videos the moment they are scanned. None of these are required. All of them build on the same underlying infrastructure.

DPPs are going to exist whether businesses want them or not. The interesting question is whether yours becomes a regulatory checkbox or something your customers actually use.

Where to start

The regulatory timelines look comfortable on paper. In practice, cleaning product data, aligning systems and building a working scan experience for real products takes considerably longer than the final months before a deadline allow. The businesses that start scoping the work now will have time to do it properly, and to experiment with what a passport could do beyond the minimum.

We deliver working DPP pilots, from scoping your product data to shipping a live passport experience. If this is on your horizon, we would love to talk. Our Sustainability and Circular Economy service.