DPP use cases across industries: from textiles to electronics

Digital Product Passport Use Cases Across Industries: From Textiles to Electronics

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) has emerged as a critical infrastructure tool for supply chain transparency and circular economy transition. Rather than serving a single industry, DPPs operate across diverse sectors—textiles, electronics, manufacturing, and beyond—each with distinct data requirements, stakeholder networks, and sustainability objectives. A structured analysis of 82 supply chain use cases demonstrates that DPPs enhance transparency and traceability across supply chains, enabling more effective sustainable and circular supply chain management while supporting EU regulatory compliance (Zhang & Seuring, 2024). Understanding how DPPs function across different industries reveals both their universal value and the context-specific implementation challenges that organizations must navigate.

Defining Digital Product Passport Use Cases

DPP use cases represent concrete applications where product lifecycle data—from raw material sourcing through end-of-life—flows across supply chain actors to achieve measurable sustainability, compliance, or operational outcomes. These use cases are not theoretical; they reflect how manufacturers, retailers, regulators, and consumers interact with passport data to make decisions. The scope varies considerably: some use cases focus on regulatory compliance documentation, while others prioritize circularity metrics, material traceability, or consumer transparency. Research analyzing 40 recent publications on DPP implementation identifies key guidelines for DPP structure, technology requirements, and adoption barriers while revealing that implementation remains fragmented across supply chains, with distinct information requirements and infrastructure needs depending on industry context and circular economy objectives (Lopes & Barata, 2024). This fragmentation underscores why understanding industry-specific use cases is essential for effective DPP deployment.

Textile Industry Use Cases

The textile sector represents one of the most mature DPP application domains, driven by stringent EU regulations and complex global supply chains. Textile manufacturing involves multiple transformation stages—fiber production, spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, and assembly—each introducing environmental and social data points that must be consolidated. Digital product passports enhance transparency and traceability in the textile industry by consolidating product lifecycle data across stakeholders, thereby supporting circular economy principles and enabling compliance with EU regulations like the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) (Carvalho, Silva, & Abreu, 2025).

Within textiles, specific DPP use cases include:

• Material composition traceability: Tracking fiber type, blend ratios, and synthetic content from supplier through finished product, enabling accurate end-of-life sorting and recycling decisions.
• Chemical input documentation: Recording dyes, finishes, and processing chemicals used at each production stage, supporting consumer safety claims and regulatory compliance.
• Water and carbon footprint attestation: Capturing production-phase environmental metrics—water consumption, energy use, emissions intensity—to substantiate sustainability claims and enable carbon accounting across the supply chain.
• Repair and remanufacturing enablement: Providing care instructions, material specifications, and component sourcing data to support garment durability, repair services, and secondhand market operations.
• Compliance demonstration: Consolidating evidence of labor practices, chemical restrictions, and due diligence requirements mandated by ESPR and other regulations into a single verifiable record accessible to authorities.

The textile case illustrates how DPPs function as compliance infrastructure while simultaneously enabling circular business models. By making material composition and production conditions transparent, DPPs reduce information asymmetry between supply chain tiers, allowing retailers and brands to select suppliers based on circularity readiness and enabling consumers to make informed purchase decisions aligned with their sustainability preferences.

Electronics and Manufacturing Use Cases

Electronics represent a second critical application domain where DPPs address regulatory mandates, resource scarcity concerns, and complex multi-tier supply networks. A comprehensive DPP framework and implementation template demonstrates how digital product passports enhance supply chain transparency and enable sustainable manufacturing practices, with particular applicability to electronics and other sectors seeking to transition toward circular economy models (Psarommatis & May, 2024).

In electronics, DPP use cases operate across distinct supply chain functions:

• Conflict mineral and material sourcing documentation: Tracking rare earth elements, cobalt, lithium, and other strategic materials from mine to assembly, ensuring compliance with supply chain due diligence regulations and enabling consumer transparency regarding material origins.
• Component-level repairability data: Recording component specifications, spare part availability, repair procedures, and technical documentation in machine-readable format, supporting right-to-repair legislation and independent repair ecosystems.
• Battery health and lifespan estimation: Maintaining detailed battery manufacturing date, chemistry, charge cycle history, and performance degradation metrics to inform reuse and recycling decisions, critical for electric vehicle and energy storage transitions.
• Hazardous substance management: Documenting restricted substances (lead, mercury, asbestos) and their locations within complex assemblies, enabling safe disassembly and material recovery during end-of-life processing.
• Software and firmware versioning: Recording software update history, security patch status, and component compatibility to extend device lifespan and support manufacturer accountability for product security.
• Circular supply chain optimization: Aggregating end-of-life data from consumer devices to inform design decisions, material selection, and recycling infrastructure investment in subsequent product generations.

These electronics use cases demonstrate how DPPs function as operational systems enabling resource efficiency, not merely compliance documentation. By making component specifications and historical performance transparent, DPPs enable manufacturers to design for disassembly, support independent repair and remanufacturing, and optimize material recovery strategies based on empirical data rather than design assumptions.

Cross-Industry Implementation Patterns and Functional Benefits

Across textiles, electronics, and other sectors, structured analysis of 82 supply chain use cases reveals consistent functional areas where DPPs create value. These include:

1. Resource circularity: DPPs enable tracking of material composition, component recovery potential, and product disassembly pathways, allowing organizations to quantify and optimize material loops.
2. Emission reduction: By consolidating environmental impact data across supply chain stages, DPPs support carbon accounting, supply chain optimization decisions, and science-based target validation.
3. Supply chain governance: DPPs establish verifiable records of compliance, material origins, and production conditions, reducing audit costs and enabling third-party verification of sustainability claims.
4. Consumer transparency: DPPs translate complex supply chain data into formats consumers can access via QR code or digital interface, supporting informed purchasing and post-purchase product care decisions.
5. Regulatory compliance: DPPs consolidate documentation required by ESPR, the Data Act, GS1 standards, and emerging regulations into structured, machine-readable formats, reducing manual compliance overhead.

The recognition of these cross-industry patterns has prompted platform approaches to DPP deployment. DPP-as-a-service solutions enable organizations to instantiate passports for their specific industry context without building proprietary systems, reducing time-to-market and promoting interoperability standards like EPCIS 2.0 and GS1 Digital Link.

Industry-Specific Information Requirements and Infrastructure Needs

While functional benefits span industries, systematic review of 40 recent publications reveals that DPP implementation remains fragmented, with distinct information requirements and infrastructure needs depending on industry context and circular economy objectives (Lopes & Barata, 2024). Textiles prioritize material composition and chemical input data; electronics emphasize component-level repairability and material sourcing; food and beverage systems require traceability to specific production batches; and pharmaceuticals mandate serialization and anti-counterfeiting measures. This fragmentation reflects legitimate differences in product complexity, supply chain structure, and regulatory environment.

Successful DPP deployment thus requires industry-specific design work: identifying which data points drive compliance or circular economy value; defining actor roles (who generates, validates, and accesses data); selecting technical standards (GS1 identifiers, EPCIS events, Digital Link syntax); and establishing governance mechanisms ensuring data quality and security. Organizations implementing DPPs must therefore invest in understanding their industry’s specific requirements rather than assuming generic solutions will suffice.

Transitioning from Pilot to Scaled DPP Implementation

Current research on DPP use cases emphasizes the gap between pilot projects and scaled deployment. While structured reviews demonstrate clear value creation through DPPs—enhanced transparency enabling circular supply chain management and supporting EU regulatory compliance—many organizations face barriers transitioning from proof-of-concept to operational systems. These barriers include data standardization challenges across supply tiers, integration with legacy enterprise systems, and uncertainty regarding return on investment for businesses in early supply chain positions.

The framework and implementation template developed for electronics and manufacturing sectors provides a methodological approach to scaling DPPs: defining clear data governance structures, establishing verification mechanisms for upstream data, and creating feedback loops enabling continuous improvement of passport data quality (Psarommatis & May, 2024). Similar structured approaches are emerging in textiles, supporting industry consortia in defining sector-specific implementation standards.

Frequently Asked Questions

What specific data points should a textile DPP include to support circular economy objectives?

Textile DPPs require material composition (fiber type, blend percentages), chemical inputs (dyes, finishes, processing aids), production location and date, care instructions, expected lifespan, repair options, and end-of-life recovery potential. Research shows that consolidating these data points across supply chain stakeholders enables accurate sorting for reuse or recycling while demonstrating compliance with ESPR requirements (Carvalho, Silva, & Abreu, 2025).

How do electronics DPPs support right-to-repair and product longevity?

Electronics DPPs embed component specifications, repair procedures, spare part sourcing information, and software update history in machine-readable format accessible to independent repair providers and consumers. This transparency extends product lifespan by enabling maintenance and repair decisions based on verified component data rather than proprietary manufacturer information systems.

What infrastructure standards enable DPP interoperability across industries?

GS1 standards (Global Trade Item Numbers, EPCIS 2.0 event data format, and GS1 Digital Link syntax) provide foundational interoperability enabling different industries to exchange DPP data through standardized identifiers and event structures. However, industry-specific information requirements mean that textiles, electronics, and other sectors must define additional data schemas above these baseline standards (Lopes & Barata, 2024).

References

• Zhang A.; Seuring S. (2024). Digital product passport for sustainable and circular supply chain management: a structured review of use cases. International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications. https://doi.org/10.1080/13675567.2024.2374256
• Psarommatis F.; May G. (2024). Digital Product Passport: A Pathway to Circularity and Sustainability in Modern Manufacturing. Sustainability (Switzerland). https://doi.org/10.3390/su16010396
• Lopes C.; Barata J. (2024). Digital Product Passport: A Review and Research Agenda. Procedia Computer Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2024.09.517
• Carvalho C.; Silva C.J.; Abreu M.J. (2025). Circular Economy: Literature Review on the Implementation of the Digital Product Passport (DPP) in the Textile Industry. Sustainability (Switzerland). https://doi.org/10.3390/su17051802