Industrial products are getting passports
A passport for a product may sound like the start of an airport joke. For manufacturers selling into the EU, however, it is becoming something they need to prepare for.
A Digital Product Passport, or DPP, is a digital record linked to a physical product, usually through a QR code. It can provide information about where materials came from, what a product contains, whether it can be repaired and what should happen when it reaches the end of its life.
The European Commission’s DPP Registry went live on 20 July 2026, while certain batteries will be the first products required to carry passports from 18 February 2027. Requirements for iron, steel, aluminium, textiles, tyres and construction products are being developed in stages.
For communications teams, this matters because the information behind product claims will become easier to access, verify and compare.
Manufacturers regularly describe their products as durable, responsibly sourced, more sustainable or built to last. But the evidence behind those claims may be spread across engineering, procurement, sustainability and operations, only reaching the PR team when someone starts drafting the launch copy.
Once that supporting information is easier to access, gaps in the data become harder to miss. If a brochure says “responsibly sourced” while the available data is patchy, that gap will be easier for customers and regulators to see.
KPMG’s 2026 European Digital Product Passport Readiness Survey, which covered more than 70 European organisations, found that only 19% considered themselves well prepared. The report highlights challenges around data quality and connecting information held across different systems, while many companies have yet to assign clear ownership for the work.
Although these questions often sit with IT or compliance, the answers affect claims used in brochures, press releases, websites and sales presentations.
Communicators should involve engineering and operations before launch materials are drafted and ask where each claim came from. Can it be proved? Is the same wording being used everywhere? Does the evidence support it?
PR teams do not need to become engineers. They do, however, need enough technical understanding to explain the details accurately and avoid saying more than the evidence supports. The World Economic Forum says a DPP can include material composition, origin, repair history and recyclability, all of which can provide useful detail for case studies, media briefings, interviews and customer communications.
Even when a passport contains hundreds of data points, readers will not want all of them. Good industrial PR will choose the most useful facts, explain what they mean and shape them into a story that people can follow.
Customers may soon be able to scan a product instead of solely relying on a manufacturer’s description. That leaves PR teams with a simple but important job — making sure the words match the information attached to the product.