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What is the digital product passport?

A clear guide to the Digital Product Passport (DPP): what it is, what it holds, how it works, and when it becomes mandatory in the European Union under the ESPR regulation.

Reading time9 minutes
Updated15 June 2026
TopicESPR & DPP

01Quick definition

A digital product passport (DPP) is a permanent, human- and machine-readable record tied to a physical product through a QR code, NFC tag or RFID chip. It brings together, in a single verifiable place, what used to be scattered across spec sheets, certificates and spreadsheets: material composition, origin, environmental footprint and the product's lifecycle history.

The idea is simple: every object carries its own identity. Whoever scans it - a consumer, a retailer, a repairer or an authority - opens the right record and sees the information they are entitled to.

In one sentence

The DPP is the digital identity of a physical product: a verifiable record that follows it from manufacture to recycling.

02Why now: the ESPR regulation

The digital passport has stopped being a voluntary best practice and become a legal requirement. The driver is the ESPR - the European Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU 2024/1781), in force since July 2024.

The ESPR sets the framework; the concrete requirements arrive afterwards, category by category, through delegated acts. The digital passport is one of the central pieces of this regulation: it makes a product's sustainability visible and underpins a more circular economy, where repairing, reusing and recycling no longer depend on lost information.

In parallel, batteries follow their own path: the EU Battery Regulation (2023/1542) makes the battery passport mandatory from 18 February 2027 for industrial and electric-vehicle batteries above 2 kWh.

03What a DPP holds

The exact content varies by category, but the structure repeats. A well-built passport is organised in four layers:

Identity
A unique, serialised identifier for every item - not just for every model. Each piece has its own record.
Content
Material composition, substances of concern, origin, carbon footprint and care and repair instructions.
History
Every lifecycle step recorded - manufacture, sale, repairs, second-hand and end of life.
Access
Layers of visibility: the consumer sees the essentials, the regulator sees compliance, the brand controls what is public or restricted.

What sets it apart from a simple product sheet is granularity and verifiability: the information is serialised at the item level and anchored in sources that can be audited.

04How it works, in practice

The passport has two parts: the physical carrier and the digital record.

The physical carrier

It is the entry point - a printed QR code, an NFC tag or an RFID chip applied to the product or its packaging. It does not hold the data; it holds only an address. When someone reads it, they are routed to the correct record.

The digital record

This is where the data lives, hosted stably and independently of the physical tag. It typically rests on open standards such as GS1 Digital Link, which links a product identifier to a resolvable web address, ensuring that different systems - shops, regulators, recyclers - can read the same passport.

Common mistake

The QR code is not the passport. It is only the key. If the record behind it is not permanent, interoperable and verifiable, it does not meet the ESPR - however beautiful the printed code may be.

05DPP vs. traditional labels and tags

A composition label or an energy rating says something about a model, at a moment. The digital passport differs in three ways:

At the item level
It does not describe the model in the abstract - it describes that concrete piece, with its own history.
Alive over time
It grows with the product. A repair, a resale or a recycling event is recorded as a new event.
Machine-verifiable
It is read by systems, not only by people - which lets compliance, sorting and reverse logistics be automated.
Keep reading

Want the dates and who must comply, category by category? See the ESPR timeline 2027–2030. Specific doubts? Browse the DPP frequently asked questions.

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