Digital Product Passport – From Obligation to Strategic Asset

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is the EU’s response to growing environmental challenges and the need to transition toward a circular economy.  The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) introduces a new era of product transparency: the Digital Product Passport will become mandatory for many product categories starting in 2027. 

One message stands out: the Digital Product Passport is not just about compliance – it’s an opportunity to create a data-driven platform that makes the entire value chain transparent and responsible, enabling business renewal, improved transparency, and sustainable development. Now is the time to act – and turn this change into a competitive advantage. 

What is DPP? 

The Digital Product Passport is the EU’s answer to environmental challenges and the need for circularity. It serves as a digital representation of a product, consolidating lifecycle data – from raw material origins to manufacturing, usage, and ultimately recycling or disposal. 

It’s not just text about a product. It’s the story of every product – where it comes from, how it’s made, and where it ends up. Now is the time to turn that story into a competitive edge. 

Three Perspectives, One Goal: A More Sustainable Product 

1. Product characteristics: technical details, identifiers, composition, and materials
2. Environmental impact: carbon footprint, emissions, and recyclability
3. Circularity potential: durability, repairability, upgradability, and reusability 

The goal is to enable traceability, recycling, and reuse while ensuring minimum sustainability requirements under the ESPR framework. 

DPP will gradually cover multiple product categories, including iron & steel, aluminium, textiles, furniture, tires, detergents, paints & coatings, lubricants, chemicals, energy-related products, and electronics. Batteries will have their own Battery Passport. 

5 Reasons Why DPP is a Strategic Opportunity 

The Digital Product Passport can be transformed into a strategic investment that supports sustainability, innovation, and competitiveness. It can incentivize the development of more sustainable products and processes while building a transparent and responsible product narrative that strengthens business growth. 

1. Regulatory compliance: Access to the EU market requires DPP 
2. Competitive advantage: Make sustainability visible and measurable 
3. Operational efficiency: Transparency drives efficiency 
4. Consumer trust: Open data enhances brand value 
5. Future readiness: Build a scalable model which allows to build beyond DPP 

How to Expand Value Beyond Compliance 

While regulation brings requirements, it also opens doors to better product data management, demonstrating responsibility, and creating new business models. DPP includes extensive product data that can be leveraged to meet EU compliance, improve data governance, build more transparent and efficient processes, optimize product design for circularity, meet growing customer expectations, and create new services. 

New Business Models 

When designed correctly, DPP can become a tool for business and value chain development: enabling better data collection and utilization, deepening circular economy collaboration, and connecting information for service improvements (e.g., spare parts traceability, end-of-life circular services). 

Reusable Data Foundation for Compliance 

Data collected for DPP also supports other requirements – CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, CBAM, and ESPR – meaning the same data foundation serves multiple reporting and compliance needs. 

Data Quality & Visibility Across the Product Lifecycle 

DPP consolidates product information into one entity: connecting design, manufacturing, sales, service, and usage data, enabling more automated reporting and traceability. This improves data quality, trust, and security – all of which can be leveraged in multiple ways. 

Preparation Starts with Understanding – How to Build the Foundation 

Preparing for DPP is a strategic process centered on data. The first step is understanding your data: analyzing what product information is available, identifying gaps, exploring how data can support other business needs, assessing current technical solutions, and planning the path toward DPP implementation. 

How to Get Started – Five Steps to Begin Your DPP Journey 

1. Lifecycle mapping: Identify processes and stages where DPP data is generated and who is responsible (R&D, procurement, manufacturing, sales, usage, service). 
2. Analyze existing data: Review known data points – availability, quality, sources (ERP, PLM, MES, PDM, catalogs, order data, installation base, labeling & serial number data). Include the entire value chain, including suppliers and partners, as DPP requires collaboration and data sharing. 
3. Identify business potential: Explore use cases for DPP data – sustainability reporting, maintenance planning, spare parts, resale or recycling, customer portals, and digital services. 
4. Assess IT architecture: How will DPP data be created and shared across systems and interfaces? Consider data generation, retrieval from sources, and needs of different stakeholders. 
5. Plan roadmap & next steps: Define metrics and scaling based on previous analysis. How to move toward implementation and integrate DPP into business operations? Remember: data is the core of DPP – quality, timeliness, and usability are key. 

Need Support?
We offer an 8-week program to kickstart your DPP journey: 

• Weeks 1–2: Lifecycle mapping & stakeholder engagement
• Weeks 3–5: Data analysis
• Week 6: Business potential identification & IT architecture assessment
• Week 7: Roadmap planning & iteration
• Week 8: Sharing results 

Want to learn more? 
Watch Jutta’s presentation at Women in Tech  
Read and download the Digital Product Passport whitepaper 
Contact us to book a 45-minute consultation to review your current state and first steps