The Digital Product Passport as Infrastructure: How Europe Is Reorganizing Value Creation
- Lioba Galliet
- Jan 27
- 2 min read
What’s truly new about the Digital Product Passport isn’t regulation itself, but the way it reorganizes markets, data, and value creation.
That’s exactly the perspective Thomas takes in his latest guest article for How Green Works. He frames the Digital Product Passport not as a political instrument or sustainability measure, but as an infrastructural foundation: a system through which transparency, governance, and competitiveness will increasingly be organized.
By connecting value creation, market mechanisms, and operational reality, Thomas makes the Digital Product Passport readable for what it really is: a new ordering system for product data in Europe.
The Digital Product Passport is not a tool — it’s a system
Anyone who views the Digital Product Passport as a single tool - whether a QR code, a data field, or a compliance artifact - misses the point. Its core does not lie in the application, but in the underlying logic.
The DPP defines how product data is created, how it is connected, and how it remains usable throughout the entire product lifecycle. Materials, components, use, and end-of-life are no longer documented in isolation, but understood as part of a shared structure.
This shifts the focus from fragmented documentation to a consistent data logic. Information becomes interoperable for internal processes as well as for market surveillance, partners, and customers.
Infrastructure, not reporting
This is where the difference between obligation and potential becomes clear. In the context of the Digital Product Passport, transparency is not a moral goal, it is an economic one. When data is structured properly, it can be reused multiple times: for compliance, service, repair, or market access.
The Digital Product Passport makes this kind of reuse systematically possible for the first time. It reduces complexity not by simplifying information, but by organizing it.
A European ordering system for product data
Seen in a broader context, the Digital Product Passport is part of a European infrastructure project. It creates a shared language for product data across industries, countries, and systems.
Standards like these have reshaped markets before—not through regulation alone, but through reliability and comparability. The DPP follows this same tradition.
Those who read it merely as a regulatory obligation overlook its real impact. The Digital Product Passport is neither a data repository nor a standalone solution—it is infrastructure, and with it, a shared European value-creation architecture.
What this means in concrete terms for companies - and why Europe is pursuing its own path - is explored in detail in the full guest article by Thomas L. Rödding on How Green Works (in German).