Digital Product Passports (DPPs) represent a major shift for businesses, requiring them to track materials and assess environmental impact throughout a product’s lifecycle. By providing a comprehensive record of a product’s journey, DPPs aim to enhance transparency and sustainability across industries.
However, implementing DPPs comes with significant challenges. Businesses must navigate inconsistent data collection and the complexities of embedding sustainability into existing operations. Rolling out DPPs requires both technological advancements and a shift in business mindset.
Despite these obstacles, compliance is essential. Failure to meet DPP requirements can lead to regulatory penalties, reputational harm, and heightened scrutiny as a non-compliant brand possibly leading to market access being revoked. As regulations tighten, businesses that proactively adapt will gain a competitive edge in an increasingly sustainability-driven market.
In a conversation with Sann Carrière, the Founder and Director of digital solutions platform Orobo, we explore how DPPs can enhance supply chain transparency, the challenges of data collection, and the need for standardized sustainability reporting.
What is a Digital Product Passport?
Businesses and consumers often lack visibility into a product’s origins and composition, leaving them to take it at face value. Similarly, when a product reaches the end of its life cycle, many are unsure how to dispose of it responsibly.
To address this issue, Orobo introduces the concept of a Digital Product Passport, likening it to a “medical record” for products.
This digital identity provides a detailed account of a product’s entire journey—from sourcing raw materials and manufacturing to distribution and market entry. It documents not only the materials used and the production process but also offers guidance on proper usage, recycling, and end-of-life disposal.
The DPP provides a comprehensive record of a product’s journey. “It's the full life cycle of a product, including multiple use cycles, that gets logged throughout its use,” Sann says.
Implications: Why is it important to have a digital product passport?
The European Union introduced its Green Deal in 2019, signaling the inevitability of new sustainability regulations. While early adopters embraced these changes, mainstream adoption has led to pushback—particularly from industries facing disruption. “We all knew that these new regulations were coming, and we also knew that there would be pushback when things would become more and more clear,” Sann says.
Despite this resistance, Sann suggests that maintaining an accurate DDP will be essential to regulatory compliance. While the EU may be more lenient during the DDP’s initial rollout, businesses must strive to meet the transparency and sustainability requirements to avoid penalties, increased scrutiny, and supply chain disruptions in the long-term.
What are the key challenges that you foresee given the changing dynamics?
There are three major challenges relating to the DDP rollout.
Resistance to change
Sustainability initiatives like a DPP seem like a logical response to climate-related challenges. However, implementing them is often more difficult than it appears. According to Sann, the primary obstacle is “all related to the individual and to human behavior.”
Adopting new ideas, especially in sustainability, tends to happen in waves. If there were more time to adjust, people might be more forgiving of slow progress. “But we are confronted with climate change and the climate crisis, and that's moving much faster than even the worst-case scenarios that were shared only five years ago,” she explains.
On one hand, the urgency of the situation leaves little room for delay, forcing action. On the other hand, the sheer scale of the crisis can be overwhelming, causing many to freeze, unsure of where to begin. As a result, inaction, resistance to change, or outright denial often become the default responses. In many cases, it could result in a much longer duration to adopt change.
The complexity of the supply chain
“The Digital Product Passport is a supply chain compliance solution,” says Sann. “It’s very much based on how a product is made chronologically. That means that in order for an end product to be put into the market, all preceding steps have a form of verification, because otherwise, the end data will not make sense.”
Given this chronological nature, a successful DPP rollout requires continuous data tracking and cross-verification. If discrepancies or gaps arise, a business must trace issues back to the supply chain, such as with the raw material supplier, to correct them. This ability depends on multiple stakeholders, each with varying levels of digital readiness and compliance, which illustrates the complexity of integrating DPPs into any supply chain.
Mitigating data gaps in the supply chain
A common assumption is that supply chain actors are unwilling to share data. However, Sann explains that the real issue isn’t resistance but the absence of relevant data. “A lot of these data points have never been important, valuable. So data has not been collected on these specific elements that need to go into a Digital Product Passport,” she says.
This lack of visibility presents a major risk. Many companies, even large producers, do not have a full understanding of their supply chains. “For an outsider, this may sound remarkable that as a large producer, you might not always know how your supply chain is constructed or what kind of processes go on. But that's the reality that we face: data gaps because of a lack of data and data collection,” Sann notes.
The role of Asia within the global sustainability ecosystem
With Europe’s lead in sustainability regulations, Asia’s manufacturers and producers will need to adapt. “If I dial into the Digital Product Passport, it will mean that any material or product that flows into the European Union or contributes to becoming a product in the European Union will need such a passport when it enters,” Sann says.
Many Asian businesses lack the support available to European enterprises for this kind of compliance. “We don’t see that many supporting software providers, solution providers here [in Asia] that actually help reach that same level of sustainability data that we can see in Europe, where there are much more consultancy firms that are helping prepare for this upcoming regulation,” she notes.
The DPP rollout begins with the battery industry in 2026, followed by textiles, plastics, and construction, with full implementation by 2030. “It’s going to be on a gradual basis, but that timeline is clear and has been communicated,” Sann says.
While this timeline may be challenging to meet, Asian businesses must prepare to play a larger role in the global shift toward sustainability.
Partnering with Orobo and Unravel Carbon
Orobo provides a supply chain compliance solution, providing verifiable supply chain data to create transparency for DPPs. Blockchain technology plays a key role in this process, allowing for an immutable record of a product’s lifecycle.
In this way, Orobo’s platform helps companies meet compliance requirements and also enables better decision-making by assessing the sustainability of materials and production methods.
To get started with Orobo, companies can simply reach out and identify a high-impact product to begin logging data.
The partnership with Unravel Carbon enhances this effort by bridging DPPs with emissions tracking. “I see this movement to, in the future, have one very large data set of sustainability-related data points,” says Sann.
Clients using Unravel Carbon for emissions reporting may also require DPPs, and by working together, the two companies can streamline sustainability data collection and improve operational efficiencies.
Conclusion
The DPP represents a significant step toward sustainable supply chains, but its success depends on widespread adoption. While some companies already track sustainability data, many still lack consistent methods or standards. A unified approach could bridge this gap and help businesses substantiate their environmental impact.
Asia’s role in this transition is crucial, especially as European regulations begin affecting global supply chains. Many Asian manufacturers are unprepared for compliance due to limited support infrastructure. With the phased rollout starting in 2026, businesses must act now to adapt or risk falling behind.
Beyond regulatory compliance, closing data gaps in supply chains remains a key challenge. Many companies struggle with visibility into their sourcing and production processes. Platforms like Orobo and Unravel Carbon offer solutions by enabling transparency and accountability through verified data tracking.
Looking ahead, new incentives could further encourage engagement. "So—if I can dream big—that one of the [features] we are developing is to have a tokenized approach to that part of the product use cycle," Sann says, explaining that reward systems for responsible recycling could drive consumer participation and change behavior from the bottom up. Some other exciting features that are under development are data verification tools and a badge system that assigns a sustainability score to Digital Product Passports.
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