Is The Digital Product Passport Just Another European Obligation, Or Is There a Logic Behind It?

The short answer is that the driver is economic before environmental, and it is a serious one: for Europe, it is a matter of security.

Once you understand this, the Digital Product Passport requirement stops looking like a bureaucratic whim from Brussels and reveals the strategic logic behind it.

A Continent That Depends on Others

Start with one figure. Just over 12% of the materials entering the European economy come from recycling. Everything else—almost 90%—comes from virgin raw materials, much of which are imported.

And importing has become increasingly fragile. For some materials, it is not even a matter of percentages. Heavy rare earth elements, used in electric motors and wind turbines, are entirely sourced by Europe from a single country: China supplies 100% of the EU’s demand. There is no Plan B.

We have learned the consequences of such dependence the hard way. Over the past five years, one disruption after another has exposed the risks: a pandemic that brought factories to a standstill, a ship blocking the Suez Canal and disrupting billions in global trade every day, the semiconductor shortage that cost the European automotive sector nearly one hundred billion euros in value, the 2022 gas crisis, and the recent wave of trade and geopolitical tensions.

Each time, the lesson has been the same: being too dependent on others eventually comes at a high cost.

From Dependence to Regulation

This is where the strategy begins. Europe first embedded security into its raw materials policy through the Critical Raw Materials Regulation: it sets 2030 targets to increase domestic extraction, processing, and recycling, while ensuring that the EU does not depend on any single third country for more than 65% of a critical raw material supply.

Then it moved one step further upstream, to the design stage. The European Commission estimates that more than 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined during the design phase. It is at this moment—when a product is conceived and engineered—that the issue of material dependence is also addressed.

This is why the framework regulation is called ESPR, from Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. The name itself reveals where the challenge is being tackled: in the design process.

And the Digital Product Passport is the tool that makes this information visible, one product at a time.

And the Markets That Are Opening Up

There is also another side to the story, and it is not about protection. Recycling raw materials, repair, reuse, and remanufacturing already provide jobs for more than four million people in Europe. Remanufacturing alone—the process of restoring used products to like-new conditions and reselling them with a warranty—is currently worth around thirty billion euros, and industry organizations expect this market to grow towards one hundred billion euros by 2030.

These markets are already emerging. Companies that start organizing and structuring their data today will reach them ahead of competitors, rather than trying to catch up when it is already too late.

And there is a second driver pushing in the same direction. Less waste, more reuse, and products designed to last longer: all of this benefits the environment, first for our continent and ultimately for the world as a whole.

But it does not end there. The Digital Product Passport also makes the Single Market more consistent, creating the same competitive conditions for everyone: anyone selling in Europe must play by the same rules, whether they are a European manufacturer or a non-EU company. At the same time, it gives consumers a level of product transparency that simply does not exist today.

The Digital Product Passport is the first step in a broader European choice: to reduce dependence on external sources, waste less, compete on equal terms, and provide greater transparency to consumers.

Seeing it this way, as a strategic system-level decision rather than just another compliance requirement, changes the decisions companies need to make today.