Where most organisations actually stand right now regarding Digital Product Passports.
Digital Product Passports (DPP) have moved from a future sustainability discussion to an operational business priority much faster than many organisations expected. And when you talk to the people closest to it; supply chain leads, sustainability directors, product data managers, the conversation almost always arrives at the same uncomfortable truth: the data isn’t ready.
Not because organisations don’t have the data. They do. It’s sitting somewhere in an ERP system, a PLM platform, a supplier spreadsheet, a legacy tool that nobody wants to touch. The problem is that it’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
What Digital Product Passports Actually Require
Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), organisations will need to provide verified, accessible information about product composition, sourcing origins, manufacturing locations, recyclability, and more, through accessible, traceable product information
The timeline is tightening:
• Late 2026 to Q2 2027: Textile-specific requirements expected to be defined
• February 2027: Digital Battery Passports go live for industrial, EV, and transport batteries
• 2027–2028: Mandatory textile DPP compliance begins phasing in across EU markets
• April 2028: EU-wide Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes become operational
That’s not far away. And for organisations that haven’t started building the foundations, the window is shorter than it looks.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
Here’s what makes DPP genuinely difficult, it doesn’t live in one team’s lane.
Supply chain, sourcing, compliance, sustainability, merchandising, product management, IT, they all own a piece of the puzzle. In most organisations, those pieces don’t connect. Systems weren’t built to talk to each other. Data gets duplicated, contradicted, or quietly ignored. Nobody has a single trusted view of a product from raw material to retail shelf.
DPP forces that issue into the open. It doesn’t create the problem, it just makes it impossible to keep ignoring.
The Hidden Cost of Doing Nothing
Many organisations will wait until regulation deadlines get closer before reacting. It happens all the time. And it’s expensive. The organisations making the most progress aren’t treating DPP as just another future compliance task. They’re using it as an opportunity to fix long-standing data issues like fragmented product records, inconsistent supplier information, and limited supply chain visibility. That reframe matters, because if the outcome is a better governed, more connected data foundation, the investment pays back well beyond the regulation itself.
The Commercial Reality Behind DPP
There is also a much bigger commercial conversation happening beneath the compliance headlines. Retailers, manufacturers, and consumer brands are all competing for the same customer spend in an increasingly pressured market. Organisations that can improve supply chain visibility, build customer trust, respond faster to reporting requirements, and operate with cleaner, more connected data foundations will simply be in a stronger position commercially.
That’s why the race to DPP readiness is not just about avoiding future compliance risk. It is about operational efficiency, resilience, reputation, and competitiveness. The businesses that move early have an opportunity to reduce manual processes, improve supplier collaboration, strengthen sustainability reporting, and create a more trusted view of their products across the organisation, all of which ultimately impacts the bottom line.
DPP and EPR Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) increases responsibility on retailers and manufacturers for the full lifecycle of products, including recycling, reuse, waste management, and product recovery. At the same time, DPP introduces growing expectations around traceability, material transparency, supplier visibility, and accessible product information.
That is why many organisations are now treating DPP and EPR as part of the same wider data and operational readiness challenge.
Where To Start
The first step is creating a trusted, connected view of product, supplier, and sustainability data across your systems. Without that foundation, producing Digital Product Passports at the scale and accuracy regulations will require becomes very difficult, very quickly.
Cloud Perspective has been helping organisations build that foundation since 2011. As an Informatica Platinum Partner, we work with retailers, manufacturers, and consumer goods businesses to get DPP and EPR-ready without adding unnecessary complexity to already stretched teams. We have successfully implemented over 150 projects using Informatica.
Informatica from Salesforce is a global enterprise data management company that helps organisations manage, govern, connect, and trust their data across the business. Informatica are consistently top right corner of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for their MDM solution.
The challenge is already here. The organisations acting now will be best prepared for what comes next.
