How Brands Can Prepare for the Digital Product Passport

Whether you currently sell products in Europe or plan to expand there in the future, you’ll need to be aware of changes in the regulatory landscape.

The Digital Product Passport (DPP), a new sustainability regulation, could have significant implications for your brand’s operations. Here’s what you need to know about the law and the steps your organization can take to prepare for it. 

What Is the Digital Product Passport?

The European Commission Digital Product Passport is a new regulation that requires all companies that sell in the European Union (EU) to provide detailed environmental data throughout the product life cycle.

To comply with the law, companies must provide the following information for any product they manufacture or sell in the region:

• The product’s origin
• The materials used to develop the product 
• The product’s environmental impact
• Product disposal recommendations

Part of the European Green Deal, the DPP is one of several initiatives that regulators are enacting to advance sustainability, improve transparency across product value chains, and achieve the EU’s goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2050.

The DPP has wide-ranging implications for both brands that sell in the EU and those that work with suppliers in the region. The law will largely affect companies in the apparel, footwear, electronics, batteries, construction materials, furniture, and chemicals industries, but all companies who do business in the EU need to be prepared.

Digital Product Passport Compliance Best Practices

The EU passed the DPP in 2024, but it won’t go into effect until 2026, and companies have until 2030 to fully comply with the law. Here are several best practices your brand can implement in 2025 before the DPP takes effect next year.

Conduct a Data Inventory

As a first step, map every stage of the product life cycle. Internal stakeholders and supply chain partners will need to collaborate effectively to pinpoint what data teams should collect at every stage of the process for each product, where this data lives, who should own data collection, and who should have access to the data.

It may be beneficial to create a Digital Product Passport steering committee to oversee the implementation process, starting with product and data mapping. From there, you can identify potential data gaps and develop a full-scale DPP data management strategy.    

Standardize Your Data

Once you’ve inventoried your data, you’ll need to devise a system for standardizing it.

The DPP requires every product to have a unique identifier, such as a QR code or radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag. Companies also must include information about each product’s origin, all the materials used in its development, the product’s environmental impact, and information about how to safely repair, recycle, or dispose of the product at the end of its life cycle. Use these requirements as a framework for your data standards.

As part of this process, you should:

• Create rules for naming conventions.
• Determine a taxonomy for categorizing and organizing product data.
• Establish a consistent schema for labeling and tagging product information.
• Ensure all data is in the same format.

Additionally, it’s critical to create a data governance policy to properly secure all the proprietary information you collect and ensure only the appropriate business users have access to it.

Taking these steps will make it easier for your stakeholders to find relevant data and for your organization to streamline the DPP compliance reporting process.

Build More Robust Data Management Systems

To comply with the new law, brands must ensure their product data is machine-readable and easily accessible. Brands aren’t allowed to store information in documents or on web pages.

You may already have a product information management (PIM) system in place, but you likely store other relevant supply chain information in separate systems. Integration — whether through open application programming interfaces (APIs) or other solutions — will be critical to bringing your information ecosystem together and ensuring you have accurate product data to maintain DPP compliance.

A technology like a product experience management (PXM) platform can be extremely valuable from an interoperability and integration perspective. A PXM solution connects product data across your commerce and supply chain ecosystem, centralizing and streamlining product information management.

It also has advanced capabilities that support artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automation, which will save your team time gathering, activating, and deploying product data for the Digital Product Passport and other regulatory and commercial use cases.

Test and Adapt

Starting with a few small test cases or pilot projects can help your organization gradually ramp up its DPP compliance program before full implementation.

You may want to start with a specific line of business, a single product, or a less complicated product value chain that doesn’t include dozens of suppliers spread out across different regions.

Whatever approach you choose, use it to identify potential sticking points in the compliance process — such as data gaps or issues calculating a product’s carbon footprint. Establish a strategy for resolving these challenges before expanding your compliance program to your entire product catalog.

Develop a Post-Implementation Strategy

Once your organization creates its compliance program, you’ll also need a plan for making adjustments as the DPP regulation evolves.

Create processes or use technology to stay on top of the regulatory environment and any new compliance requirements. Also, plan to regularly audit and validate product and sustainability data to minimize potential compliance, business, and reputational risks.

How Digital Product Passport Compliance Can Help Advance Global Sustainability

The Digital Product Passport is one part of the EU’s effort to promote sustainability and advance accountability and transparency throughout the product life cycle.

Fulfilling DPP compliance obligations will require your organization to create a comprehensive data management strategy, foster deep cross-functional collaboration, and use integrated technology to streamline how you collect and share product data. 

How Digital Product Passport Compliance Can Help Advance Global Sustainability

The Digital Product Passport is one part of the EU’s effort to promote sustainability and advance accountability and transparency throughout the product life cycle.

Fulfilling DPP compliance obligations will require your organization to create a comprehensive data management strategy, foster deep cross-functional collaboration, and use integrated technology to streamline how you collect and share product data.

It’s a lot of effort — but it will be well worth it for your brand to expand its reach into the EU, differentiate itself with sustainability impacts, and strengthen product information management in ways that help you create a more agile and competitive business.