Every Digital Product Passport carries a common core of roughly a dozen fields, then adds a category specific set on top. The core covers identity, materials, origin, carbon, end of life, repairability, hazardous substances, supply chain and legal responsibility.
This post is the practical reference: what the fields are, where the data usually comes from, and which ones will hold your project up.
The common core
These appear across categories. Treat this as the baseline you should be able to produce for any product you sell.
| Field | What it means in practice | Where the data comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Unique product identifier | An identifier resolving to the product, the batch or the individual item. Item level is the direction of travel | Your own numbering, usually on a GS1 standard |
| Material composition by percentage weight | Every material as a share of total weight, not a description | Suppliers, plus a bill of materials you trust |
| Country of manufacture | Where the product was made, not where the company is registered | Manufacturing records |
| Carbon footprint per unit | A calculated figure per unit, with a stated method | Lifecycle assessment, supplier emissions data |
| Recycling and end of life instructions | What a consumer and a recycler should each do with it | Product and materials engineering |
| Repairability or durability index | A score or rating against the relevant category method | Design and test data |
| Hazardous substance data | Substances of concern, aligned to REACH reporting | Supplier declarations, safety data sheets |
| Tier 1 supplier name and location | Who supplied you directly, and from where | Procurement records |
| Energy and environmental performance | Consumption and efficiency figures where the category demands them | Test house results |
| Repair and refurbishment instructions | How the item is opened, serviced and put back into use | Technical documentation |
| Conformity documentation | Declarations, certificates and test evidence | Compliance function |
| Responsible economic operator contact | The named party legally accountable in the market | Legal and regulatory |
Two of those are harder than the rest, and they are the same two on every project: material composition by percentage weight, and carbon footprint per unit. Both depend on data your suppliers hold.
Textiles
On top of the core, textiles add fibre level declaration and supply chain visibility.
- Every fibre present above 1% by weight, declared individually
- Supply chain mapping beyond your direct supplier, which is where most of the work is
- Care, washing and durability information in a structured form rather than prose
- Recycled content, where claimed, with evidence behind the claim
- Chemical and finishing treatments applied to the fabric
The 1% threshold is the line that catches people. Blends, elastane content, coatings and trims all count, and the person who actually knows the answer is usually two or three steps up the chain from your supplier.
Electronics
Electronics are less about materials and more about the product’s life after sale.
- Energy efficiency class and measured consumption
- A repairability score against the category method
- Spare parts availability duration, stated as a period and committed to
- Software support period, likewise stated and committed to
- Disassembly information for recyclers, including how to reach the battery
- Critical raw materials present in the device
The last two bullets are data. The two in bold are commitments. They commit your business for years after the sale, and they should be signed off by someone who can actually hold your operation to them, not by the person filling in the passport.
Batteries
The battery passport is the deepest of the three and is generally treated as the template the other categories will move towards. It runs to over a hundred attributes. The groups that matter:
| Group | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Identity and general | Manufacturer, manufacturing date and place, battery category, weight |
| Material composition | Active materials, critical raw materials, hazardous substances |
| Material origin | Sourcing of cobalt, lithium, nickel and natural graphite, for conflict minerals and due diligence reporting |
| Carbon footprint | Calculated by lifecycle stage, not as a single number |
| Recycled content | Percentage of recycled cobalt, lithium, nickel and lead, per battery |
| Performance and durability | Rated capacity, power, internal resistance, expected lifetime, cycle life |
| State of health | Dynamic data updated through the battery’s life |
| Due diligence and conformity | Supply chain due diligence report, declarations, test results |
Note the last two rows. Performance and state of health are not fixed at manufacture and cannot be filled in once and forgotten. A battery passport is a live record, which makes it an operational commitment rather than a compliance document.
Not everyone sees the same fields
The regulation expects tiered access, and it changes how you should think about all of the above.
A consumer sees care, materials, recycling and repair. A recycler sees composition and disassembly detail. A market surveillance authority sees the full record, including conformity documentation and the history of changes.
So the passport is not a page you publish. It is a data set with several views onto it, and the shape of your product data matters far more than the design of the consumer facing page.
Which fields will actually hold you up
In order of how much pain they cause:
- Carbon footprint per unit. Needs a method, supplier emissions data and evidence. Months, not weeks, and for batteries it has to be split by lifecycle stage.
- Material composition by percentage weight. You probably have a bill of materials. Whether it is accurate to percentage weight, and evidenced, is a different question.
- Supply chain mapping beyond tier 1. Your direct supplier may not want to tell you who their supplier is, because that relationship is their commercial value.
- Material origin for conflict minerals. Due diligence reporting, not a field you can fill in from your own records.
- Everything else. Largely yours already, and mostly a publishing problem.
Three things people get wrong
“We will fill the fields in nearer the time.” The fields you own take days. The fields your suppliers own take months of asking, and there is no version of this where asking earlier is worse.
“A PDF will do.” The requirement is structured, machine readable data. A document attached to a code satisfies nobody, least of all the recycler or the authority reading it.
“One passport per product line.” The direction is item level, and for batteries state of health makes it unavoidable. Designing at product line level now means rebuilding later.
Where to start
Take one product. Fill in the twelve core fields, with evidence, and see how far you get in a day.
Whatever you cannot fill in is your project plan, and it will be a data and supplier problem rather than a technology one.
Veribli builds Digital Product Passports on top of tagging technology that has been tracking individual items through circular supply chains for nearly thirty years, including live data that changes over an item’s life. To talk through the Digital Product Passport data fields your category requires, call us on 01482 455 855.