Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains
Figure
5.1: Federated reference architecture: no single host, vendor neutral by design. The Cross-border Recognition Bridge( centre column) connects issuer-side ecosystems to holders and verifiers via the eIDAS 2.0 trust chain.
Crucially, the architecture does not assume a single host. Catena-X, the GBA Battery Passport, CIRPASS-2 lighthouse pilots, and national portals each operate as issuer-side ecosystems connecting through the Bridge; any of them can serve credentials for the same DPP provided the lower layers are honoured. Vendor neutrality is achieved by design rather than enforced by policy.
6 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK
The European DPP is not, at its core, a labelling project. It is the foundation of a multi-tier, crosssector data infrastructure for supply chains, and it will be measured by whether that infrastructure interoperates, governs trust, and includes small economic actors.
Our pilots in battery and textile suggest four near-term priorities for the community. First, harmonise semantics across Catena-X, the GBA Battery Passport, CIRPASS-2, and UNTP at the data-point level rather than at the standards-document level: the work of Zhang and Seuring [ 10 ], Adisorn et al. [ 13 ], and Berger et al. [ 14 ] is ready to be operationalised. Second, treat the IIC Material Circularity Framework and the supply-chain DPP architecture as complementary halves of the same circular-economy stack [ 8 ]. Third, design SME tiers from the start, not as a future amendment. The arrival of the JTC 24 horizontal European Standards in May 2026 makes this harmonisation tractable for the first time, and alignment with the emerging JTC 25 dataspace standards will extend it to the exchange layer [ 19 ][ 21 ]. Fourth, operationalise the Cross-border Recognition Bridge: integrating the eIDAS 2.0 QTSP infrastructure across the full Bridge chain is
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