DPP – Digital Product Passport

A passport used for travel contains details on a person’s identity, citizenship, and travel history. Similarly, a Digital Product Passport (DPP) provides information on a particular product and its sustainability attributes. Accordingly, DPP is an approach for promoting more sustainable production, circular business models, and informed purchase decisions.

What is Digital Product Passport?

In 2020, the European Commission introduced the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP). It serves as one of the fundamental pillars of the European Green Deal regarding sustainable growth. The objective of CEAP is to improve the sustainability, circularity, and energy efficiency of products, including Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE), throughout their life cycles from production to end-of-life disposal. This includes all the practices for materials sourcing, manufacturing, and supply chain. Nevertheless, a significant obstacle to circular economy strategies can be a lack of knowledge about a product regarding its composition, manufacturing processes, or life cycle.

On 30^th March 2022, the European Commission presented Digital Product Passport (DPP) as part of the proposal for an Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). The DDP is a “product-specific data set” that establishes product disclosure requirements. Consequently, it improves product traceability and makes all the relevant data about a particular product available to all stakeholders, including consumers and producers.

What is the Purpose of a DPP?

The goal of digital product passports is to collect information about a product and its supply chain and disseminate it along whole value chains so that all participants, including consumers, have a better awareness of the materials and goods they use and their embedded environmental effects. Moreover, a DPP’s purpose is to encourage sustainability and ultimate reuse or proper recycling of a product at the end of its life.

What Information does a Digital Product Passport Contain?

A digital product passport incorporates details on a product, including data about its ingredient, sustainability, circularity, recyclability, reusability, reparability, upgradability, durability, energy efficiency, and compliance. These may include certificates such as Health Product Declarations (HPDs) and cradle-to-grave life cycle assessments (LCA). Furthermore, you may add a bill of materials (BOM), environmental compliance status (e.g., EU RoHS, EU REACH, EU POP), end-of-life guidance, carbon footprint, and more.

Who may Access the Information on a DPP?

Several users may have access to the data of a DPP, including:

Producers
Importers
Distributors
End-users and customers
Recyclers
Repairers
Remanufacturers
Competent national authorities
European Commission
Public interest organizations

Benefits of DPP

Digital product passports benefit various stakeholders, including businesses, consumers, legislators, and recyclers. Examples of these advantages are:

Solving information gaps across the supply chain
Increasing consumer trust by efficiently storing and sharing information in formats appropriate for the various user types
Enhancing energy and material efficiency, prolonging product life, and optimizing its usage
Aiding organizations with decision-making while developing sustainable policies, ranging from product eco-design requirements to the larger circularity objectives
Enabling consumers to identify greenwashing and to make informed decisions about products’ sustainability performance
Developing new prospects for circularity and strengthening the viability of circular business models
Assisting in determining which products represent a risk to human health and the environment and encouraging the substitution of these types of products
Integrating with other product databases, such as the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling (EPREL) and Substances of Concern In Products (SCIP) database, to share available information
Helping policymakers assess organization compliance with sustainability initiatives.

Which Products require a Digital Product Passport?

According to the CEAP’s guidelines, the first three industries to use digital passports, due to their existing environmental impacts and intrinsic potential for circularity and recycling, are:

Construction (per Construction Products Regulation (CPR) proposed in March 2022)
Battery (per EU Battery Regulation implemented in 2026)
Textile (per EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles implemented in March 2022)

The DPP requirement becomes more widespread as more supply chain traceability laws are implemented, encompassing a broader range of product categories. The European Union has already identified other target industries and markets for using DPP, including electronics, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), plastics, packaging, food, etc.

Examples of Digital Product Passport Across Europe

Here are examples of digital product passports throughout Europe:

Product Circularity Data Sheet (PCDS) of Luxembourg
Circular Product Data Protocol for the textile industry
CircThread for home appliances

CIRPASS – Collaborative Initiative for a Standard-based Digital Product Passport for Stakeholder-Specific Sharing of Product Data for a Circular Economy

Reach out to the Enviropass team to learn more about digital product passports.

Environmental Assessment