The Digital Product Passport

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is comparable to a comprehensive digital index card or a “digital CV” that the EU seeks to introduce for a wide range of products. It is intended to provide information needed, for example, for more efficient repair and recycling of products. We believe that the DPP has a significant potential to pave the way towards a more circular economy as it can address the information deficit along a circular value chain that often impeded circularity.

Whether the potential of the DPP is realised, however, depends very much on the design of the product passports. Therefore, we call on European and German policy-makers to (1) make the provision of information facilitating a circular economy obligatory for manufacturers, (2) to make these information accessible for all relevant actors along the value chain and (3) to design the DPP itself as resource-light and energy-efficient as possible.