What every manufacturer selling into the EU needs to know about the Digital Product Passport, the February 2027 battery deadline, and the data foundation behind traceability and sustainability.
by Daniel Dahlin
Informational only, not legal advice. Confirm all regulatory details against the official EU sources cited below and with your own legal and compliance teams before publication.
Most manufacturers already do traceability, whether or not they call it that. A recall forces you to find every affected unit; a quality event sends you hunting for the batch, the supplier, the process step. The problem is that this capability tends to be reactive and partial, re-stitched each time from legacy systems that were never designed to talk to one another.
The EU is about to make it mandatory, standardized, and machine-readable. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), a growing list of products placed on the EU market must carry a Digital Product Passport (DPP): a machine-readable record, reached through a data carrier such as a QR code, that describes a product across its entire lifecycle, from origin, materials, environmental impact, compliance, and circularity to end of life. With it, traceability shifts from a reporting afterthought to a gate on the right to sell. Batteries set the clock: the battery passport is mandatory from February 2027.
