New Paper on Digital Product Passports

Great news from Digi4Circular: our researchers at Paderborn University and Data CoLAB have co-authored a new peer-reviewed paper, now published in the Proceedings of the Design Society (ICED25).

“Digital Product Passports and the Challenge of Product Structure Granularity: A Decision-Making Framework for the Level of DPP Integration” Katharina Rohde, Finn Budde, Bárbara Patrício, Tânia Ferreira, Ana Gonçalves, Manuel Ott, Iryna Mozgova

What it’s about?

Digital Product Passports are set to become a core part of the EU’s circular economy rules, but one question keeps holding up real-world adoption: how detailed should a DPP be? Describe a product as a whole, or break it down into every module and part? Too shallow, and you miss what regulators and recyclers need. Too granular, and it becomes unmanageable.

Our team’s paper offers an answer: a structured framework linking product structure, regulatory relevance, and information depth to decide the right DPP level for each part of a product.

Read it