Can Digital Product Passports Reignite Sustainability Momentum?
Over the last ten years, sustainability has matured significantly as a field of practice. Across industries, organisations have built dedicated teams, integrated environmental and social commitments into corporate strategy, and invested in reporting standards that were largely absent a generation ago. That progress is genuine and worth acknowledging.
What the field is now encountering is a more demanding challenge: the transition from commitment to measurable, product-level impact. Corporate sustainability strategies have become sophisticated instruments for goal-setting and communication. The product-specific data needed to substantiate and advance those strategies, however, has remained fragmented, difficult to verify, and largely invisible to the actors who most need it.
Across value chains, products carry an enormous amount of implicit information: about the materials they contain, the conditions under which they were produced, their expected durability, their carbon footprint, or their potential for repair, reuse, or recovery. This information is generated at every stage of design, sourcing, and manufacturing. Yet for most products, it dissipates as they move through distribution and into use. Consumers cannot access it. Repair technicians do not have it. Recyclers must work without it. Consumers and secondary market operators make decisions in relative opacity.
The Information Gap and Its Consequences
The absence of reliable product-level information has consequences that extend in two directions simultaneously: inward, affecting how organisations manage and improve their own sustainability performance; and outward, affecting how consumers and markets respond to sustainability claims.
From an internal perspective, the lack of standardised product data limits the quality of decisions along the entire value chain. Procurement teams cannot effectively compare the sustainability performance of competing products without verified, comparable information. Design teams lack feedback on how materials and components actually behave across a product's full lifecycle. Supply chain managers cannot build accountability into sourcing processes without traceability that goes beyond the first tier.
From an external perspective, the same information gap has contributed to a well-documented erosion of confidence in sustainability claims. When green slogans are not verifiable, and when supply chain transparency remains a corporate narrative rather than an auditable record, the credibility of sustainability communication is weakened across the board. The European Union has directly addressed this problem through the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, which introduces stricter rules and prohibitions on unsubstantiated environmental claims across the single market.
Reliable product transparency is not a peripheral enhancement to sustainability strategy. It is the foundation on which credible sustainability practice depends. The result is a structural disconnect between sustainability ambition and the operational reality of how products move through the world. Addressing that disconnect is the central contribution of the Digital Product Passport (DPP).
What Is a Digital Product Passport (DPP)?
A Digital Product Passport is a structured digital record that is created for a specific product and remains associated with it throughout its entire lifecycle. It functions as a kind of digital identity for the product, holding information that any authorised actor can access at any point in that product's life, whether during purchase, use, repair, resale, or recycling.
The information a DPP can contain varies by product category, but typically includes: material composition and substances of concern; origin and supply chain data; environmental and performance indicators; instructions for use and maintenance; repairability and durability scores; and guidance for end-of-life handling and recovery. This information is accessible via a data carrier, such as a QR code, physically present on the product or its packaging.
What distinguishes the DPP from existing physical labels and certifications is not simply the format, digital rather than printed, but the nature of the information itself. A physical label is fixed at the moment of production: it captures a snapshot and cannot change. The DPP can become a living record. Depending on the product category and applicable requirements, it can be updated as a product moves through its lifecycle, accumulating repair history, tracking changes in component status, reflecting updated environmental assessments, and remaining accessible at every stage of life. This capacity to evolve with the product is what makes the DPP fundamentally different from the labelling systems that preceded it.
This represents a more fundamental shift than it may first appear. For most of the history of manufactured goods, products functioned as transactional objects: they were made, sold, used, and eventually discarded, with limited informational continuity between lifecycle stages. The DPP introduces a different logic. Products progressively become informational ecosystems, associated with dynamic layers of lifecycle data that accompany them from sourcing through to end-of-life. This data layer intersects naturally with broader developments in industrial digitalisation, including AI-powered analytics, digital twins, and interoperable industrial data spaces, creating the conditions for sustainability to be embedded directly into the same technological ecosystems that drive industrial innovation.
Product transparency requirements are gaining regulatory traction globally. The European Union has established the legal basis for the DPP through the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which entered into force in 2024. It will progressively apply to a broad range of physical products placed on the EU market, with some defined exclusions and requirements introduced through delegated acts by product category. Similar product transparency and traceability approaches are under active discussion in markets including the United Kingdom and China, pointing toward growing international momentum for how products carry and communicate verified information about themselves.
More Than a Green Tool: A Multi-Dimensional Instrument
The significance of the DPP extends well beyond its environmental and circular economy applications. Understanding its full range of implications requires situating it within the broader context of industrial and digital strategy.
The DPP is an explicit component of the digital transition for industry as it connects to the vision of interoperable data spaces across value chains, to the aim of standardising access to product information through agreed data management and access rights, and to the broader ambition of building a more transparent and accountable market. It is simultaneously a sustainability enabler and a digital infrastructure instrument, and its value derives from both dimensions.
The range of benefits it generates across different actors and contexts is considerable.
Product quality and authenticity:The DPP creates a verifiable record of what a product contains, how it was produced, and where its components originated. This matters not only for environmental performance but for quality assurance, safety compliance, and the detection of counterfeit goods. Standardised, authenticated product data raises the evidentiary standard for what can credibly be placed on the market.
Operational efficiency and market access: For manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, the DPP creates opportunities to reduce costs associated with documentation, labelling, and the administrative processes required for market entry. The elimination of redundant multilingual labelling cycles and annual packaging updates across different markets represents meaningful operational simplification for companies operating internationally.
Supply chain intelligence and resilience:The DPP provides a structured foundation for supply chain mapping, material traceability, and supplier verification. Organisations that build DPP-ready data systems simultaneously develop capabilities for due diligence, risk management, and the supply chain visibility that has become a strategic priority across industries. This data infrastructure overlaps substantially with broader due diligence, responsible sourcing, and sustainability reporting requirements emerging across markets.
Innovation and product development feedback loops: Verified lifecycle data creates feedback mechanisms between market performance and the design process. When manufacturers have access to reliable information about how materials and components actually perform across a product's full life, rather than relying on assumptions or fragmented supplier data, they gain a more accurate basis for product improvement, durability optimisation, and the development of genuinely more circular designs.
New business models and service ecosystems:Verified product identity and lifecycle data are the informational foundations on which circular service models depend. Maintenance services, repair networks, refurbishment operations, product-as-a-service offerings, and second-life market platforms all require reliable product data to function at scale. The DPP provides that foundation and creates conditions for organisations to build service capabilities around their product data infrastructure.
Consumer empowerment and trust:For individuals, the DPP provides the basis for genuinely informed purchasing decisions: not marketing language, but structured information about product composition, durability, repairability, and environmental performance. This supports both consumer protection and the kind of substantiated brand trust that is increasingly difficult to build through communication alone.
Regulatory compliance and market integrity: For public authorities, standardised digital product data enables more automated and effective market surveillance, reduces the cost and complexity of compliance verification, and creates a reliable backbone for sustainable public procurement. It also strengthens the enforcement of anti-greenwashing provisions such as those introduced by the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive.
Product Transparency as a Competitive and Collaborative Advantage
The Digital Product Passport introduces something that business strategies have long needed but rarely had access to: a product-level data layer that connects every actor in a value chain to the same information, in near-real time, across the entire lifecycle. With the DPP, product transparency can change the basis on which products compete and the terms on which value chains collaborate.
Organisations that invest in building this product data infrastructure early are not simply preparing for compliance. They are building a different kind of relationship with every actor: upstream suppliers, downstream service partners, and the individuals who ultimately decide whether a product is worth buying, keeping, repairing, or recommending.
That evolution changes what winning looks like, progressively reintegrating sustainability and circularity into the core of product innovation. Price remains a factor, but it is no longer the only axis. Products that can demonstrate what they contain, how long they last, how they are designed to be repaired or recovered, and under what conditions they were made are competing on substance. The companies behind them are building a record and a stronger collaborative ecosystem, not just a reputation.
In summary, the DPP creates the conditions for a new kind of accountability that benefits all parties. When product data is structured and persistent, the distance between what is claimed and what is true becomes visible. This is not a burden for organisations genuinely committed to improvement. It is a platform on which authentic performance can be recognised and rewarded.
References
European Commission. Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, July 2024. eur-lex.europa.eu
European Commission. Circular Economy Action Plan 2020, COM(2020) 98 final, March 2020. ec.europa.eu
European Commission. EU's Digital Product Passport: Advancing Transparency and Sustainability, 2023. data.europa.eu
European Commission. Directive (EU) 2024/825 on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition, March 2024. eur-lex.europa.eu
Rouzeaud, Marion. DiPPa: Rethinking the Way We Buy Things with Digital Product Passports. Amazon KDP, December 2025. Available on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/0zAsicP
