Digital Product Passport — the machine is switched on, the products have not yet gone through it

1 · What it is — and how the system works

The European Commission’s definition: “a digital identity card for products, components and materials” (official ESPR page, EN). It is not a PDF file attached to the product: it is a distributed system, described in five steps on the official DPP page.

1. The economic operator creates the passport. The complete product information is held by the manufacturer/importer itself or by a DPP service provider, together with the mandatory registry metadata.
2. A data carrier links the physical to the digital. “A digital data carrier, such as a QR code, links the physical product to its DPP” — the QR code is the official example; the technical rules come from EN 18220 (data carriers) and EN 18219 (unique identifiers).
3. The registry generates a unique URI. The Registry (“the registry of the digital product passport”, Article 13 of the ESPR) stores the unique identifiers and the mandatory registry data and generates a unique registry identifier (URI) for each passport. Imported products can be checked at customs (Article 15); those manufactured in the EU must be registered before being placed on the market.
4. Access is by role. Consumers, repairers, recyclers and authorities access different information depending on the role — access rights are managed by law (and standardised in EN 18239).
5. Introduction is progressive, product by product. It only becomes mandatory when a sectoral delegated act requires it — with at least 18 months of transition after the act is adopted.

The DPP is the package’s compliance and circularity instrument: it is added to the CE marking, it does not replace it. Elegant detail of the Batteries Regulation: “the battery passport shall cease to exist once the battery has been recycled” (Article 77(8)).

2 · The four laws of the “passport” family

Three regulations create product passports; the buildings directive creates the sibling instrument at the level of the building. All verified in the authentic Portuguese text (OP Cellar / EUR-Lex).

3 · Timeline 2019–2030

Dates verified on the Commission’s official pages (timeline published in the ESPR and DPP pages) and in the regulations themselves. The dates from September 2026 onwards are the Commission’s indicative roadmap (“subject to publication requirements”).

4 · Which products, and when — the 1st work plan 2025-30

“The first work plan will include four final products, two intermediate products and two legislative acts establishing horizontal requirements” — COM(2025) 187. Market dimensions and indicative adoption calendar, verbatim from the document.

Construction is not on this list — and it is not an oversight: construction products have their own passport in the new CPR (section 5). The official DPP page cites “batteries, textiles, iron and steel and construction products” as the next groups. 19 products from the old regime keep their transition until 31 December 2026 under the old Ecodesign Directive.

5 · Construction — the passport comes through another law (and this is where it touches BIM)

The new Construction Products Regulation (EU) 2024/3110, applicable since 8 January 2026, creates a “system of digital product passports for construction products” deliberately aligned with the ESPR’s DPP.

Recital 92 is explicit: “it is necessary to delegate to the Commission the power to adopt acts […] to establish a digital product passport system for construction products aligned, as far as possible, with the digital product passport created by Regulation (EU) 2024/1781”. Articles 75–79 mirror the ESPR architecture: system (75), passport (76), general requirements (77), technical design and operation (78) and — the bridge to practice — unique identifiers and registry (79). In other words: for a manufacturer of window frames, panels or precast concrete, the road to the DPP is not the ESPR, it is the CPR.

Where this meets BIM. The passport is the product data layer; the BIM model is the design object layer. The natural bridge between the two is the dictionary: stable properties anchored in dictionaries (buildingSMART’s bSDD, which already supports multiple languages) and unique product identifiers — the same principle as the generic DPP’s EN 18219/18220. Whoever feeds BIM catalogues today with poorly governed properties (translated names, inconsistent units) will have to redo it when the construction product passport becomes mandatory — because the same data will circulate in the model, in the passport and in the declaration of performance. [I] our inference — the CPR↔bSDD/IFC link is not a legal requirement, it is a reading of the architecture.

6 · Standardisation — the 8 EN standards of CEN-CLC/JTC 24

JTC 24 “Digital Product Passport — Framework and System” (DIN secretariat) developed the first series of 8 European standards under the Commission’s standardisation request M/604. Six are already cited in the Official Journal of the EU — and the citation is what gives “presumption of conformity”.

7 · Pilots and ecosystem

The general rehearsal was EU-funded: CIRPASS “prepared the ground for the gradual piloting and implementation” of DPPs — and ended in March 2024 with roadmaps for three value chains: electronics, batteries and textiles.

The sibling project CIRPASS-2 continues the work of preparing the piloting; CIRPASS organised the final events in collaboration with the Battery Pass (the German consortium that built the battery passport’s reference prototype) and Product Information 4.0 projects. In parallel, the state infrastructure was assembled: the Ecodesign Forum (2024), the work plan (2025), the standards and the registry (2026). The DPP applied to each value chain now arrives with steel (Q4 2026) and batteries (2027).

8 · Status as of 2 September 2026

9 · The literature — all 893 papers published

Corpus collected on 2026-09-02 by script (OpenAlex + Crossref, dedupe by DOI; method in the footer): all papers with “product passport”, “battery passport”, “material passport” or “building passport” in the title — product (DPP) 685 · material 115 · battery 72 · building 21. 36 (4%) have authors with Portuguese institutions.

How to read: the green line is the corpus with passport in the title (our membership criterion); the red line is the mentions of “digital product passport” in title or abstract (1,357 in total) — the papers that discuss the subject without devoting their title to it. The pattern is the same in both: no mention until 2019, take-off with the ESPR proposal (2022), explosion after adoption (2024-2026). Half the field published in the last 12 months. The year distribution covers 889 of the 893 papers — 4 have no year in the record.

Most cited

The full corpus — 893 papers, with filters

Search by title/author/journal, filter by category, year, open access only or Portuguese authors only. The link opens the DOI (or the full text, when open).

10 · The piece — opinion