Digital Product Passport Overview and Fundamental Principles

other

Project Details

Relevant SDG targets

• SDG 8 – Decent work and Economic Growth
• SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• SDG 12 – Responsible consumption and production patterns
• SDG 13 – Climate Action

Project Purpose

The global transition toward a circular and sustainable economy demands enhanced transparency, traceability, and accessibility of product-related information across the entire lifecycle. The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is emerging as a key enabler of this transition by providing a product-specific, electronically accessible set of data to support sustainability, compliance, and innovation.

Currently, numerous regulatory initiatives, industry pilots, and standardization efforts related to DPP are underway across various regions and sectors. While these initiatives share common goals, there is a growing risk of fragmentation due to divergent technical approaches and requirements. This fragmentation could:

• Create barriers to international trade,
• Increase complexity and implementation costs, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs),
• Undermine the global interoperability and effectiveness of DPP systems.

To address these challenges, a joint initiative has been launched between ISO/TC 154 and UNECE, under the framework of the ebMoU. According to the Terms of Reference for joint activities, the project under a joint working group must follow procedures on both the ISO and UNECE sides.

On the ISO side, the initiative begins with ISO/PWI 25534-1 (Digital Product Passport — Part 1: Overview and Fundamental Principles). This standard serves as the foundation for the ISO 25534 series, establishing a coherent overview of the DPP concept, its objectives, architecture, principles, and guidelines. It aims to ensure that future DPP standards and implementations are developed in a consistent, coordinated, and stakeholder-inclusive manner.

The objectives of ISO/PWI 25534-1 include:

• a) Providing a standardized overview of the DPP concept, architecture, and fundamental principles.
• b) Establishing common terminology and core principles to support global interoperability and stakeholder inclusivity.
• c) Creating a framework for coordination with existing and future DPP-related standards and regulatory requirements.

On the UNECE–UN/CEFACT side, the initiative focuses on ensuring interoperability in the development and implementation of DPP systems. This includes:

• Organizational interoperability (agreed processes, use cases, policy, legal aspects)
• Semantic interoperability (agreed ontology mappings techniques, information naming, definitions, relationships)
• Technical interoperability (agreed technical specifications, technical data model, syntax, data transport)

It begins with a high-level Business Requirements Specification (BRS), with ISO/PWI 25534-1 serving as one of the initial inputs to this broader effort.

Project Scope

Improving sustainability, including circularity, has become one of the major objectives for most industries and sectors, aiming to enhance their ability to manage supply chains more effectively and responsibly.

From a top-level perspective, all stages of the product life cycle are considered in terms of sustainability and the circular economy, including processes such as farming, cultivation, mining, hunting/fishing, forestry, manufacturing, transport/logistics, and retail.

Preparatory work carried out since 2017 recognized that UN/CEFACT’s work and mandate could play an instrumental role in supporting the harmonization and better coordination of sustainability- and circular economy-related processes. This work helps countries align their initiatives and approaches to enhance transparency across sustainable global value chains.

Logical first step:

The development a high-level BRS “for the Digital Product Passport”, aligned with relevant SDGs of Agenda 2030, with the following objectives:

• The project scope is international, cross-border, and cross-industry
• Achieve stakeholder consensus on terminology, fundamental principles, data categories, trust mechanism, and governance for the future Digital Product Passport standards family
• Provide an overview of architectural principles for the Digital Product Passport standard family
• Provide guidance on the relationship with existing standards and approaches to ensure global consistency and regulatory compliance
• Explore possibilities for alignment with other relevant standards
• Develop a high-level BRS (Business Requirements Specification) document, in line with the high-level BRS of the Buy/Ship/Pay project, where applicable.

 Logical next steps:

The DPP standardization will establish a multi-layered governance and trust framework necessary to build a robust and reliable global Digital Product Passport ecosystem. This proposed high-level BRS will be followed by several BRSs addressing standardization topics to ensure decentralization (ensuring data sovereignty), interoperability, security (e.g., e-signatures), verification (trust mechanisms), and fairness of the DPPs. The framework will create a chain of trust spanning borders, industries, and enterprises by defining the roles, responsibilities, and interaction rules for participants at each level. By separating business requirements from the specific implementation guidelines, the DPP framework can evolve over time to accommodate new technologies and changing regulatory while maintaining a high degree of consistency and interoperability.

Note: The proposed BRS will follow the BRS template published by UN/CEFACT and adhere to the UN/CEFACT Open Development Process.

Project Deliverables

The project deliverables are:

• Deliverable 1: Business Requirement Specification
• Deliverable 2: Guidelines

Exit Criteria

The exit criteria will be

• Exit Criteria for Deliv. 1: Public Review logs demonstrating all comments have been satisfactorily resolved; Final document ready for publication.
• Exit Criteria for Deliv. 2: Final document ready for publication.

Impact analysis

The Business Requirements Specification (BRS) provides all stakeholders in the circular economy with a high-level overview of Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and the principles they currently share or should share. In doing so, it establishes the basis for a common and harmonized framework for DPP standards, with this BRS representing the first standard in a series to follow.

If customs authorities, producers, and regulators adopt such a common framework, sustainability-related information can flow seamlessly across jurisdictions and countries. A harmonized DPP framework also supports the verification of product origin, sustainability claims, and compliance with trade and environmental regulations.

Moreover, it provides a foundation for digital and regulatory cooperation, as policymakers can use this BRS as a reference point for initiating their own DPP implementations.

Project Team Membership and Required Functional Expertise

Membership is open to UN/CEFACT experts with broad knowledge in the area of: Sustainability, circularity, traceability, sustainable development, circular economy, digital product passport initiatives (e.g. EU DPP), high-level interoperability (technical, organizational, semantical), EU policies (e.g. ESPR) and those of other countries or regions related to DPP and other knowledge areas, such as information technology, relevant to the DPP.

Geographical Focus

Beneficiaries

This BRS helps developing economies align with international trade rules, easing cross-border trade of products with environmental and social compliance requirements. Small businesses often struggle with complex, inconsistent trade documentation. A standardized DPP framework simplifies reporting requirements, making participation in global trade more feasible for smaller operators. With harmonized DPPs, MSMEs and women-led businesses can demonstrate sustainability compliance more easily, opening access to international buyers and markets that prioritize environmentally and socially responsible products. Digital DPP systems reduce the need for manual verification and redundant documentation, lowering transaction costs, a critical factor for small or resource-constrained businesses.

Initial Contributions

• ISO/PWI 25534-1 DPP Overview and Fundamental Principles
• UNECE Recommendation 46 Enhancing traceability and transparency of sustainable value chains in the garment and footwear sector
• UNECE Recommendation 49 Transparency at Scale
• UN/CEFACT high-level Buy-Ship-Pay BRS
• UN/CEFACT Traceability and Transparency for garments and footwear BRS
• UN/CEFACT Product Circularity Data Use Case BRS
• UN/CEFACT UN Transparency Protocol (GitLab)
• CEN/CENELEC Public Review Standards of DPP system.
• International DPP initiatives
• ISO/UNECE DPP Kick-off, DPP Ad Hoc Meeting, DPP Symposiums, DPP Workshop including Stakeholders interviews, ISO 25534-1 Meetings, etc.

Resource Requirements

Participants in the project shall provide resources for their own participation. The existence and functioning of the project shall not require any additional resources from the UNECE secretariat. Note that additional secretariat resources may be required or this project (community engagement, specialist advice, implementation testing) however these additional resources will be funded via contributions from some project member organisations (government & commercial).