This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. The narration uses an AI text-to-speech voice, and the slides, animations, scripts, and written materials were produced with the help of AI tools. Every factual claim — dates, figures, and regulatory details — was checked against primary and authoritative sources and reviewed by a human for accuracy.
Every physical product sold in the European Union is about to carry a second self. Not a label and not a barcode that only a till can read, but a digital record anyone with a phone can open: what the thing is made of, how to repair it, what is recycled inside it, and what happens to it at the end of its life. That record is the Digital Product Passport, and it arrives through the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, with the battery passport leading the way in February 2027. This course follows the passport from the law that creates it to the data it carries and the work a company has to do to be ready.
It is built in a deliberate order: why the passport exists, the ESPR framework that mandates it, what a passport actually is (the unique identifier, the data carrier, the registry behind it), the data model and its tiered access rights, the battery passport as the first real example, the product groups that follow, the duties on manufacturers, importers and retailers, the standards and interoperability work, and a practical implementation path. You get the picture a compliance lead needs and the architecture a developer needs, in one place rather than scattered across press releases and draft acts.
