For textiles, electronics & ESPR
Digital Product Passports beyond batteries
The mechanism is settled; the attribute lists are not. That combination decides what is smart to do now and what to leave alone.
Updated 2026-09-20 · All industries · Guides to the regulation
What is settled
The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) makes the Digital Product Passport the standard way product information travels in the single market. The horizontal standards that describe how a passport works — unique identifiers, data carriers, a decentralised architecture with identifiers registered centrally and data held by the operator, and tiered access — are published. The battery passport is the first live implementation of that mechanism.
What is not settled
Which products must declare what, and by when, comes per product group through delegated acts. Priority groups announced in the working plan include textiles and apparel, furniture, tyres, mattresses, and iron, steel and aluminium, with consumer electronics and ICT expected in the wave that follows. Treat any specific date you read for these groups as an estimate until the act is adopted.
Safe preparations
- Get product data out of spreadsheets. Composition, suppliers, country of manufacture, recycled content and documents: the collection work dominates every passport project and is independent of the final field list.
- Fix your identifiers. Decide how a unit, batch or article is identified, and make it unique and stable. Almost every later problem traces back to sloppy identifiers.
- Map your supply chain for data. Know who can answer which question, and start asking now — the answers take months, not days.
- Choose infrastructure whose field catalogue is configuration. A platform that treats attribute lists as settings absorbs a new product group without a migration.
What to leave alone for now
- Permanent labels for product groups whose identifier rules are not final.
- Publishing a public passport page whose required contents may still change.
- Buying a product-group-specific tool for a field list that does not exist yet.
Where OrigoPass fits
OrigoPass was built product-agnostic: battery types carry the Annex XIII catalogue, and textile and electronics types carry their own draft field sets, with access tiers, versioning, QR carriers, exports and the sealed audit trail shared between them. You can register real passports for textiles and electronics today — useful for pilots, private-label transparency claims and customer requirements that run ahead of the law — and adjust the field set when your delegated act lands, without moving platform.
If your company sells both batteries and other products, the pragmatic route is to do the battery work first, because it has a hard deadline, and to use that project to build the data habits the rest of your assortment will need.
General information, not legal advice. Verify obligations for your specific products against the regulation and, where needed, with a qualified adviser.
Frequently asked
When does the Digital Product Passport become mandatory for textiles?
No date is fixed yet. Textiles and apparel are a priority group in the ESPR working plan, and the obligation starts with a delegated act for that group, followed by a transition period. Batteries remain the only group with a firm date: 18 February 2027.
Is it worth preparing before our delegated act is adopted?
Preparing the data is worth it; printing permanent labels is not. Collecting structured product, material and supply chain data takes far longer than implementing software, and that work is independent of the final field list. Identifier and labelling rules, on the other hand, should be final before you commit them to a product.
Will a battery passport platform work for other product groups?
Only if its field catalogue is configuration rather than code. The plumbing — identifiers, data carriers, access tiers, versioning, exports — is shared across product groups by the horizontal EN 18216-series standards. What changes per group is the attribute list.