Digital Product Passports: Transitioning To Eco-Friendly Products

In the EU, regulations such as the CSRD and CSDDD are transforming how corporations disclose their sustainability information in Europe, ensuring transparency and diligence when reporting on their operations’ carbon footprint to investors and auditors.

However, these corporate reporting updates don’t fully tackle a key element of the circular economy – facilitating the transition towards eco-friendly products.  

Global markets are still plagued with physical products manufactured without product sustainability in mind, from their design to the raw materials used to craft them. This is where the ESPR, PPWR, and Digital Product Passports (DPPs) come in.

Product Sustainability Regulations

The core product sustainability regulation in Europe (but applies to organisations outside of Europe selling into the EU market) to be aware of is the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), a widely impactful piece of legislation that drastically promotes the transition towards eco-friendly products.

The ESPR is a core pillar of the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP), setting out ecodesign requirements for physical products from upwards of 30 industries. These new ecodesign requirements cover data around product sustainability, resource efficiency, durability, reparability, and recyclability.

The regulation requires each regulated product to have its own Digital Product Passport (DPP) in order to share verifiable, accurate product information with stakeholders within the product’s value chain, from manufacturers to end consumers.

This is to ensure unfettered access to rich product sustainability data, enabling:

• Customers to make informed, sustainable purchase decisions.
• Organisations to prove their product sustainability claims.
• Regulators to easily assess an organisation’s product sustainability.

Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD)

We can’t talk about eco-friendly products without mentioning packaging, an industry responsible for a third of global plastics production.

The original EU Packaging Directive of 1994 set recycling targets for packaging materials, making national governments responsible for ensuring businesses met them. It encouraged return, collection, and reuse schemes to maximise recycling.

In February 2025, the EU replaced this directive with the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), making the rules directly enforceable across member states.

Most PPWR measures take effect around August 2026, so affected organisations should start preparing for the upcoming changes alongside their ESPR compliance preparations.  

Digital Product Passports are a mandatory requirement under the ESPR, and the information contained within them will assist with PPWR compliance at the same time.

What are Digital Product Passports?

Digital Product Passports are digital records embedded into products using technologies like QR codes, RFID tags, or NFC chips, providing immediate access to dynamic data that updates throughout the product’s lifecycle - from manufacturing and distribution to usage and end-of-life.

DPPs can include data such as:

• Product ID
• Material composition
• Manufacturing details
• Supply chain journey
• Sustainability metrics
• Recyclability
• Ownership and warranties

By providing transparent, reliable data, DPPs support informed consumer choices, enhance product authenticity, and promote circular supply chains.  

Under the ESPR, the EU is making DPPs mandatory for upwards of 30 priority industries by 2030, with more industries to follow as the decade progresses.

How DPPs Aid the Transition Towards Eco-Friendly Products

Digital Product Passports form the data infrastructure for delivering product sustainability. In the following section, we’ll dive into how DPPs aid the transition towards eco-friendly products.

Sustainable Product Design  

The design phase is crucial to ongoing product sustainability. Sustainable product design focuses on utilising fewer resources to craft products of equal or greater quality than before, reducing waste and overall production costs, and enhancing brand reputation.

This is why the ESPR sets out mandatory ecodesign requirements for regulated products. But upstream manufacturers still need to be able to prove that their products are designed with sustainability at the forefront of the manufacturing process.

Digital Product Passports enable suppliers and manufacturers to communicate the physical makeup and sustainable design of their products to retailers. This will help retailers select the most eco-friendly products to market to their customer base.

Product Recyclability and Circularity

Eco-friendly products should be designed using fewer resources, but manufacturers should maximise the use of recyclable materials and components to facilitate sustainability at the end of a product’s lifecycle.

Beyond displaying a product’s raw material composition, Digital Product Passports can also contain detailed recycling instructions to enable customers to recycle products at the end of their lifecycle more effectively.

For products with more complex recycling and disposal requirements, DPPs can contain human and machine-readable instructions that specialist recycling companies can program into their equipment to efficiently break the product down and recycle the components, increasing efficiency across the board.

Packaging Reuse and Refill

Digital Product Passports can support reuse systems for eco-friendly product packaging by providing clear instructions for safe reuse - such as how many times packaging can be reused and under what conditions - helping retailers comply while ensuring customer safety.

The PPWR promotes reuse and refill systems: reuse involves packaging designed for multiple uses, while refill encourages customers to bring their own containers or use ones provided by retailers.

DPPs can also enable customer incentives, such as discounts for returning packaging or verifying refill participation, encouraging engagement with sustainable practices.

Conclusion

As the EU strengthens its sustainability framework, regulations like the ESPR and PPWR - supported by Digital Product Passports - are working to highlight the transition towards eco-friendly products and product sustainability as a critical step towards a truly circular economy.

These initiatives drive transparency, eco-design, data-driven reuse, and recycling into every stage of a product’s lifecycle. For organisations, embracing these changes now is essential - not only for compliance, but for leading the transition to a more sustainable future.

If you’re transitioning towards eco-friendly products for your organisation, Provenant’s powerful DPP platform can help your organisation efficiently display product sustainability information, promote circularity throughout your supply chain, and provide proof for green claims on product packaging.

Get in touch with Provenant and take advantage of our powerful Digital Product Passport platform, expert DPP consulting services, and dedicated technical support.

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