The European Commission is working to make data sharing more trustworthy. This is essential for driving innovation, boosting competition, and improving public services. Two major initiatives support this vision: the European Sustainability Product Regulation (ESPR), which focuses on product transparency, and the EU Data Act, which emphasises data access and portability. Although these initiatives began from different starting points, they share the same ultimate goal: enabling trusted data sharing. This article explores how these two concepts—Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and data spaces—connect and complement each other.
What is a Digital Product Passport?
A Digital Product Passport can be thought of as an online information page for a product. It provides key details that help consumers and businesses make informed decisions, while supporting repairability, recyclability, and transparency. Under the ESPR, DPPs are essential for meeting sustainability and circular economy requirements because they offer traceability throughout a product’s life cycle. To ensure consistency, standards for DPPs are being developed by the CEN-CENELEC JTC24 committee, which defines data formats, indicators, and verification processes across product categories.
What is a Data Space?
A data space is an interoperable framework that allows trusted data exchange between participants. Interoperable means that different systems and organizations can work together and share information seamlessly, even if they use different technologies. A Data Space is built on common governance principles, agreed standards, and enabling services that make data transactions secure and reliable. Work on standardizing data spaces is led by the CEN-CENELEC JTC25 committee, which is defining terminology, governance models, and technical interfaces.
How Do They Relate?
When we look closely at data sharing, a Digital Product Passport can be seen as part of a broader data ecosystem. In fact, many of the concepts used in DPPs align with those in Data Spaces. For example, JTC24 defines a DPP as “a digital record of product characteristics throughout its life cycle.” This corresponds to the term “data product” in JTC25, which refers to a unit of data sharing that includes data, metadata, and license terms. In simple terms, the DPP acts as the data product for a physical item, while license terms define how its data can be shared across the value chain.
Governance principles also overlap. Data Spaces distinguish between data producers, providers, and rights holders. Similarly, in the DPP system, the economic operator is both the producer and rights holder because they own the data before the product enters the market. The DPP service provider acts as the data provider, making the passport data available to authorised users.
Data exchange works in a similar way. When a user accesses DPP data through a physical data carrier, this action represents a data transaction. The permissions for these transactions are defined by the ESPR and other industry- or product-specific acts. These data usage permissions can be interpreted as an agreement between the data provider and the data user, ensuring that access follows clear rules and responsibilities.
Data integrity is a key concern. It means keeping DPP information accurate and trustworthy. JTC24 requires that every change to DPP data is recorded in a way that is legally binding and cannot be denied later (non-repudiable). This process, called a trust service, works like a secure log to make data transactions safe and reliable.
Overview of concepts in both Data Spaces as well as DPP terms
| Concept | Digital Product Passports (JTC24) | Data Spaces (JTC25) |
| Governance | – economic operator – economic operator – DPP service provider | – data producer – data rights holder – data provider |
| Data Exchange | – controlled data | – data transaction |
| Data Integrity | – non-repudiable and legally binding manner of creation/modification/deletion of DPP data | – trust service |
Is a DPP System a Data Space?
In many ways, yes. A DPP system follows governance principles set by ESPR, applies standards from JTC24, and supports practices that enable circular economy goals. Most importantly, it facilitates trusted transactions when users access DPP data. This means that Digital Product Passports can be considered a specialised form of data space.
A Unified Vision for the Plastics Industry
To achieve trusted data sharing across the plastics value chain, a hybrid approach is recommended. Upstream partners—such as suppliers—can use a data space before the product reaches the market. Downstream partners—such as customers and service providers—can rely on DPPs after the product is sold. This combined approach ensures transparency and trust throughout the entire lifecycle.
TNO and CircplastX—a data space for the plastics industry—enable trusted data sharing across the value chain. By applying their expertise in data ecosystems and IT infrastructure, they help the industry use data sharing to overcome challenges and achieve circularity goals.
