Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains
will carry a presumption of conformity with the ESPR; that citation had not yet taken place at the time of writing. Two further standards are under approval and expected in September 2026, including FprEN 18239 on access rights management, information system security and business confidentiality [ 19 ], which speaks directly to the confidentiality versus transparency tension discussed in Section 3.3.
These standards validate the layered approach proposed in this paper rather than displace it. EN 18219 and EN 18220 formalise the identifier and data carrier layers our pilots found to be the first technical bottleneck; EN 18216 and EN 18222 standardise the exchange and interface behaviour on which our federated, signed credential pattern depends; and EN 18223 gives system interoperability an explicit normative anchor. In February 2026 CEN and CENELEC also entered a liaison with the OPC Foundation to align DPP work with OPC UA and Asset Administration Shell practice [ 20 ], reinforcing the asset and twin layer. For implementers the pragmatic rule from Section 3.1 still holds, but its anchor is now firmer: design against the JTC 24 horizontal standards first, then map each sector schema, such as CX-0143 for batteries or the forthcoming textile delegated act, onto that common baseline. The data requirements within each such delegated act are now guided by the JRC DPP Data Requirements Methodology( JRC145830, March 2026), which provides the European Commission’ s blueprint for prioritising which data fields are mandatory, optional, or context-dependent across product categories [ 27 ].
A second committee completes the picture. CEN and CENELEC JTC 25“ Data management, Dataspaces, Cloud and Edge”, established in September 2024, is developing horizontal standards for the European Trusted Data Framework under the EU Data Act( applicable since 12 September 2025) [ 21 ]. Where JTC 24 standardises the passport itself, JTC 25 standardises the dataspace plumbing through which passports move between issuers, holders, and verifiers. Together they let the federated architecture of Section 5 rest on two converging European standards tracks. The European Commission Simpl programme adds the operational counterpart: open source middleware for cloud-to-edge federations underpinning common European data spaces [ 24 ], giving the architecture of Section 5 an EU-backed, vendor-neutral deployment substrate. At the global level, ISO / IEC JTC 5“ Digital Product Passport” was formed in Spring 2026 with DIN( Germany) as secretariat, positioning the JTC 24 European standards as the regional input into a worldwide interoperable DPP framework; substantive deliverables are expected from 2028.
4.4 THE DPP INTEROPERABILITY STACK
Combining these frameworks yields a five-layer stack against which pilots can be validated( Figure 4-1). The identifier layer uses W3C DIDs for products, organisations, batches, and processes. The trust layer uses W3C Verifiable Credentials, anchored on UNTP-compatible trust registries and, for cross-border legal-entity recognition, on the eIDAS 2.0 Cross-border Recognition Bridge— the QTSP-issued QEAA, national trusted list, and LotL chain infrastructure shown at the trust layer of Figure 4-1 and decomposed in full in Figure 5.1 [ 28 ]. The asset / twin layer uses Asset Administration Shell submodels, optionally bridged with OPC UA on the shop floor. The semantic layer draws on the UN / CEFACT Core Component Library, GS1 Digital Link, EPCIS 2.0, and sector ontologies( CX-0143 for batteries, Trace4Value / CIRPASS-2 vocabularies for textiles). The application layer is the DPP host platforms themselves. Each of these layers now has a published
14