Digital Product Passports Explained: A Reference Book Beyond ESPR Compliance
Digital Product Passports are rapidly emerging as a central concept in discussions on product sustainability, transparency, and circular economy transformation. Across policy, industry, and research, they are increasingly referenced as a mechanism to make product information verifiable, structured, and accessible throughout the entire lifecycle.
At the same time, the Digital Product Passport (DPP) is often approached through fragmented perspectives. In some contexts, it is reduced to a technical data container. In others, it is framed narrowly as a regulatory requirement linked to specific legal instruments. This fragmented understanding risks obscuring a more fundamental question: what is the Digital Product Passport ultimately meant to enable?
A newly published book, DiPPa: Rethinking the Way We Buy Things with Digital Product Passports, addresses this gap by offering a structured introduction to Digital Product Passports while exploring their broader strategic and systemic potential beyond compliance.
From regulatory signals to strategic potential
Digital Product Passports do not originate from a single regulation. They reflect a broader convergence between regulatory intent, technological capability, and growing societal expectations around transparency, accountability, and responsible production.
Across multiple policy areas, similar signals are emerging. Products are increasingly expected to carry reliable information about their composition, origin, performance, environmental impact, and end-of-life pathways. Sustainability frameworks, circular economy initiatives, and data governance policies all point toward the need for more robust and trustworthy product information systems.
Within this evolving landscape, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) represents one of the most structured regulatory expressions of the Digital Product Passport concept. ESPR translates these expectations into enforceable product-level requirements and provides a concrete starting point for implementation. At the same time, it defines minimum obligations rather than the full scope of what Digital Product Passports could ultimately become.
The ambition of this book extends beyond the legal definition of the Digital Product Passport to encompass its broader strategic potential, a future in which products carry richer metrics and more actionable information than those currently announced. While regulations establish minimum requirements, the analysis deliberately explores what a Digital Product Passport could ideally become when considered as a long-term information infrastructure rather than a compliance artefact.
Why Digital Product Passports matter beyond compliance
When approached narrowly, Digital Product Passports risk becoming another reporting layer, generating data that satisfies regulatory obligations without meaningfully influencing decisions. Similar patterns have already been observed in other sustainability disclosure mechanisms, where information is produced but not necessarily used.
The book argues that the real value of the Digital Product Passport lies in its capacity to reconnect information with action. When product data is structured, trusted, and accessible across the lifecycle, it can inform design trade-offs, sourcing strategies, supply chain collaboration, and end-of-life planning. It can support the development of circular business models, reduce greenwashing, and enable more informed economic choices.
Seen through this lens, the Digital Product Passport is not a static repository of required data. It is a dynamic system that can evolve over time, integrate new indicators, and support different decision-making contexts as expectations, technologies, and governance models mature.
The DiPPa framework: translating transparency into action
To clarify how this potential can be realized, the book introduces the DiPPa framework, structured around three interconnected stages: Illumination, Measurement, and Adaptation.
Illumination focuses on making product information visible and intelligible, identifying what truly matters rather than overwhelming stakeholders with data. Measurement examines how verified metrics enable comparison, accountability, and credibility across products and organizations. Adaptation explores how insights derived from transparency can translate into behavioral change, business model evolution, and system-level transformation.
Rather than proposing a technical methodology, the framework provides an interpretative structure. It helps explain how Digital Product Passport data can move from regulatory reporting toward strategic use, supporting decision-making across companies, value chains, and consumption contexts.
Grounded in cross-sector experience
The analysis presented in the book is informed by interviews and exchanges with more than 60 experts from manufacturing, sustainability, policy, data, and behavioral disciplines, conducted between 2024 and 2025. These perspectives reflect how Digital Product Passports are currently understood, debated, and tested across sectors.
A recurring theme emerges from these conversations. While the direction toward greater transparency is widely accepted, there is still significant uncertainty around implementation choices, governance models, and long-term use cases. The book does not attempt to resolve these uncertainties definitively. Instead, it makes them explicit and examines their implications.
This approach reflects the reality that the future of Digital Product Passports will not be shaped by regulation alone, but by the cumulative decisions of businesses, technology providers, policymakers, and consumers.
Positioning the book within the Digital Product Passport landscape
DiPPa: Rethinking the Way We Buy Things with Digital Product Passports is not a legal guide, a technical specification, or an implementation manual. It does not replace delegated acts, standards, or sector-specific guidance.
Its contribution lies in offering a structured and critical introduction to Digital Product Passports as an emerging information infrastructure. It examines why they exist, what problems they are intended to address, and how their role could evolve beyond compliance to support deeper transformations in how products are designed, evaluated, and valued.
As Digital Product Passports move from regulatory concept to operational reality, their ultimate impact will depend not only on what the law requires, but on how far stakeholders are willing to explore their full potential.
References
European Commission. (2024). Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR).
https://commission.europa.eu/energy-climate-change-environment/standards-tools-and-labels/products-labelling-rules-and-requirements/ecodesign-sustainable-products-regulation_en
European Commission. (2025). Digital Product Passport, policy and implementation framework.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/digital-product-passport_en
Rouzeaud, M. (2026). DiPPa: Rethinking the Way We Buy Things with Digital Product Passports.
Available on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/0zAsicP
