The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is linked to the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR, EU 2024/1781), which aims to make products on the EU market more environmentally sustainable.
The Digital Product Passport is an information package about a product available in electronic form, designed to improve traceability and transparency throughout the product’s entire lifecycle. It compiles the product’s lifecycle data and serves as an important tool for communicating information to both consumers and other actors in the product’s value chain. The Ecodesign Regulation aims to reduce products’ greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, and the digital product passport would make this information, among other things, available to various stakeholders. In practice, the information contained in the digital product passport could in the future be accessed, for example, via a QR code attached to the product or another scannable identifier.
The Ecodesign Regulation specifies product groups for which measures and requirements must be developed among the first. These product groups include, among others, steel and aluminum products, textiles, furniture, tires, cleaning products, paints, and chemicals. Depending on the product group, the digital product passport could include various information requirements related to, for example, the product’s materials, durability, carbon footprint, recyclability, maintenance, and reparability.