Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains
properties EU-only designs lack cross-jurisdictional verification, conformity-credential carriage, and integration with existing trade-document flows.
The practical implication: a DPP that publishes UNTP-compatible credentials is also a DPP that exporters, customs authorities, and non-EU buyers can verify. For battery and textile manufacturers exporting to the EU, including a large share of the supplier base behind the OEMs in our pilots, that compatibility is not a luxury. It is the only path by which the DPP becomes part of the existing trade flow rather than a parallel compliance burden.
4.2 OMG-FAMILY FRAMEWORKS: POSITIONING VIS-À-VIS THE IIC MATERIAL CIRCULARITY FRAMEWORK
The OMG ecosystem( now under the EDM Association) already publishes a set of frameworks directly relevant to DPP architecture. The most important for this paper is the Industry IoT Consortium( IIC) Material Circularity Framework Principles for Discrete Manufacturing, published in June 2024 [ 8 ]. The IIC was integrated into the Digital Twin Consortium( DTC) in January 2024; both now operate under the EDM Association following its acquisition of OMG in October 2025.
The IIC framework covers the asset and shop-floor layer: how digital twins, Industrial IoT, and AIor UAV-supported inspection enable material reuse, refurbishment, and recycling decisions inside or close to a manufacturing site. Our focus complements rather than duplicates that work. We operate at the cross-organisational supply-chain layer, where multi-tier interoperability, vendor-neutral identifier resolution, and federated governance dominate. In effect, the IIC framework describes the inside of the factory; this paper describes the data fabric between factories, recyclers, and regulators. Read together, the two frameworks form complementary halves of the same circular-economy stack.
Other OMG-adjacent specifications worth weaving into a DPP architecture include BPMN and DMN for governance flows, SysML for product modelling, and the Asset Administration Shell( IEC 63278), which is already gaining traction as a vendor-neutral metamodel for DPPs and is explicitly aligned with the OPC Foundation through joint Industrial Digital Twin Association( IDTA) work [ 17 ].
4.3 CEN AND CENELEC JTC 24 AND JTC 25: THE EUROPEAN STANDARDS BASELINE
The most consequential development since our pilots began is that the European standards baseline has moved from draft to published. On 27 May 2026, CEN and CENELEC, through joint technical committee CEN CLC JTC 24“ Digital Product Passport: Framework and System”, published the first six horizontal European Standards for the DPP under European Commission Standardisation Request M / 604 [ 19 ]. The package defines the technology neutral core that every sector delegated act will inherit: EN 18216:2026 on data exchange protocols, EN 18219:2026 on unique identifiers, EN 18220:2026 on data carriers, EN 18221:2026 on data storage, archiving and data persistence, EN 18222:2026 on application programming interfaces for lifecycle management and searchability, and EN 18223:2026 on system interoperability [ 19 ]. Once these standards are cited in the Official Journal of the European Union, conformant implementations
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