Thursday
17
September 2026
Help shape an Eclipse open source initiative
Open source building blocks for the Digital Product Passport
Build reusable, interoperable software that turns Digital Product Passport standards into practical building blocks for industry, public authorities, service providers, and the circular economy.
Pre-launch initiative · Community meetings in September 2026
Why participate now
Build the common foundation. Compete on the value you add.
Much of the software needed for a DPP solves common problems. Open collaboration can reduce repeated work while companies continue to compete through their products, integration expertise, and services.
Current stage
Pre-launch Eclipse initiative
There is no DPP Working Group or formal Eclipse open source project yet, and no deliverables have been agreed.
What participants can decide
Priorities and ways of working
Participants can help decide which technical work is most useful and how a future community should collaborate.
What exists today
Ideas to start from
This page proposes open source building blocks based on the DPP standards and practical industry needs.
Share common work
Develop common contracts, tests, and infrastructure together instead of rebuilding the same basic capabilities in every company.
Reduce integration risk
Test different implementations against shared specifications before making large deployment decisions.
Shape practical solutions
Bring real requirements into the open and help focus the work on components that companies and users actually need.
Upcoming online meetings
Join one of two DPP community meetings
We will introduce the proposed Eclipse open source initiative and discuss how an industry-ready implementation could reduce the time, cost, and complexity of building, integrating, and testing DPP systems. The same 90-minute session is offered on two dates.
Thursday
24
September 2026
What we will cover
- Introduce the initiative and its objectives
- Outline the proposed use cases, governance, and next steps
- Discuss how organizations can contribute code, expertise, and requirements
- Answer questions about participation
Choose the date that works best for you. Please feel free to forward the invitation to other interested organizations and contributors.
What the DPP enables
From a regulatory requirement to a practical everyday tool
The Digital Product Passport is designed to make relevant product information available across the value chain in a machine-readable format. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) provides the framework. Product-specific EU rules determine which products need a passport, when it applies, and what it must contain.
For the DPP to work in real business processes, companies, authorities, and service providers need dependable software that fits their existing IT systems. A vendor-neutral open source initiative can provide reusable components and connect suitable existing projects instead of asking every organization to start from scratch.
Increase transparency
Make relevant information about product origin, materials, supply chains, and environmental performance available to authorized users.
Promote sustainable products
Support decisions about durability, maintenance, repair, upgrades, and responsible product use.
Enable circularity
Give repair, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling actors the information they need to recover more value.
Support informed decisions
Help customers, businesses, and public authorities find information relevant to their role and access rights.
Illustrative workflow
How shared building blocks could work together
This is a simple technical example. Product rules determine the actual requirements and data.
- IdentifyA data carrier links the physical product to a unique identifier.
- FindA system uses the identifier to find the product passport.
- AccessAccess rules determine which information a user may see.
- VerifyChecks help confirm the source and detect unwanted changes.
- UseProduct information supports purchasing, servicing, repair, reuse, or recycling.
Who uses and provides DPP information?
Responsibilities depend on the product rules and on each organization's role. The technical system still has to work for everyone who provides, checks, uses, or maintains passport information.
Manufacturers
Provide and maintain the required passport information and backups for products covered by the applicable rules.
Importers
Check that covered products have the required DPP and backup before placing them on the EU market.
Distributors and dealers
Check the required DPP link and make passport access available to customers, including in online sales.
Public authorities
Use passport and registry information for customs, market surveillance, and other tasks defined by EU and national law.
Circular-economy actors
Use relevant safety, material, maintenance, disassembly, and end-of-life information for repair, reuse, and recycling.
DPP service and technology providers
Provide hosting, backup, integration, testing, identity, data-carrier, and trust services that work with other systems.
Proposed contribution areas
Where open source can turn standards into working software
These are ideas for future contributions, not committed deliverables. They are a starting point for companies, developers, researchers, and standards experts to discuss what a shared technology base should provide.
Related standards · EN 18216 · EN 18222 · EN 18223 · EN 18239
APIs and data formats
Define common interfaces and data formats that different DPP services and applications can use.
- A reusable DPP API building block
- An OpenAPI definition with examples, error responses, and generated clients
- HTTP media types and an optional portable DPP file format
Related to all eight standards
Conformance testing
Make API behavior, data models, identifiers, and access rules testable across different implementations.
- A modular DPP test engine
- Shared test data, sample passports, and reusable test cases
- Test profiles for product-specific EU rules
Related standards · EN 18219 · EN 18220 · EN 18221 · EN 18223
Product identity, data, and storage
Connect physical products to understandable passport information and keep it available over time.
- Identifier resolution and data-carrier checks
- Schemas, vocabularies, data dictionaries, and data conversion
- Version history, archiving, backup, recovery, and operator transfer
Related standards · EN 18239 · EN 18246 · across the series
Access, trust, and interoperability
Provide reusable security components and practical tools for testing DPP systems from different providers.
- Access-control examples, credentials, signatures, and integrity checks
- SDKs, adapters, deployment examples, and a shared test environment
- Joint interoperability tests and implementation guidance
Further ideas to examine
A future community could examine whether a DPP-specific media type and IANA registration are useful. It could also identify needed SDKs and adapters, reuse existing open source components, and define how product-specific profiles extend the shared DPP approach.
Open source helps with compliance work; it does not prove compliance
Using open source code or passing a test does not by itself make a DPP compliant. Each implementation still has to be checked against the applicable laws, standards, product rules, and organizational responsibilities.
Standards
Eight standards cover the technical DPP system
The standards divide the technical system into eight topics, from identifiers and data carriers to APIs, access control, and data integrity. Product-specific EU rules define which information a passport must contain and when the rules apply.
Data exchange protocols
Secure, machine-readable exchange of DPP data between systems and actors.
Unique identifiers
Product, economic-operator, and facility identifiers with global uniqueness, persistence, and interoperability.
Data carriers
The machine-readable connection between a physical product and its digital representation.
Data storage, archiving, and persistence
Storage, archiving, and durable access to current and historical information across the hybrid DPP architecture.
APIs for lifecycle management and searchability
Interfaces supporting passport lifecycle management, resolution, searchability, and data access.
System interoperability
Semantic, technical, and organizational interoperability across product groups and IT systems.
Access rights, security, and confidentiality
Access-rights management, information-system security, data protection, and business confidentiality.
Data authentication, reliability, and integrity
Mechanisms that help recipients authenticate passport data, assess reliability, and detect unauthorized change.
The descriptions above are simplified for orientation. For the official titles and current publication status, see EU Decision 2026/1736 and the CEN-CENELEC overview. Sources checked 24 July 2026.
Regulatory context
Plan with verified dates, not general rollout predictions
The ESPR sets the overall framework, but most obligations only become concrete through product-specific rules. Dates in the 2025–2030 working plan are planning dates for adopting those rules, not automatic DPP deadlines for every company. Most ESPR delegated acts will apply no earlier than 18 months after they enter into force, unless a justified exception applies.
20 July 2026
DPP Registry is operational
The European Commission has launched the DPP Registry and a testing environment. The Registry stores unique identifiers, registration data, and high-level metadata rather than detailed product information. Registration duties depend on the applicable product rules.
18 February 2027
Battery passport application
The Batteries Regulation requires a battery passport for each LMT battery, industrial battery above 2 kWh, and electric vehicle battery placed on the market or put into service.
Product-specific
Further DPP obligations
Product-specific EU rules define which products need a passport, what information is required, who may access it, and when the rules apply.
Get involved
Help shape an open DPP community
A future community needs organizations that set priorities, engineers who build and test, and experts who connect technical work to real product and regulatory needs. The initiative is still pre-launch, so no project-specific contribution channels exist yet.
Organizations shape priorities
Bring product, supply-chain, policy, and market requirements into a vendor-neutral setting and help focus shared investment.
Engineers build and validate
Contribute contracts, components, clients, tests, deployment examples, and experience from real integrations.
Experts connect the system
Translate standards, product rules, security, semantics, and circular-economy needs into profiles, test cases, and practical guidance.