A tender that asks for your product passport

On 9 September 2026 the European Commission published a procurement text that names the Digital Product Passport. COM(2026) 590 final would replace the three 2014 procurement directives with one directly applicable Regulation, and in three separate places it treats the passport as something a public buyer can ask a supplier for.

It is a proposal. It has gone to the Parliament and the Council, no rapporteur has been appointed, and it carries no date of application. Nothing in it obliges anyone to do anything today. What it does show is where the passport is heading: out of the compliance file and into the tender file.

A public buyer may ask for your conformity declaration through the passport

Article 92 of the proposed Public Procurement Act is titled “Means of proof for product requirements”. Its first paragraph reads:

Public buyers may require that economic operators provide a declaration of conformity or a declaration of performance and conformity of a product through the digital product passport pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 or, where this does not yet exist, other equivalent electronic means as means of proof of conformity or compliance with requirements or criteria set out in the specifications, the award criteria or the conditions for the performance of contracts.

“May”, not “shall”. A buyer who uses Article 92(1) would be choosing to, and the same sentence lets a supplier without a passport prove the same thing by other electronic means. But look at what the passport is being asked to carry: the declaration of conformity, or the declaration of performance and conformity, as proof against the specifications, the award criteria and the conditions for performing the contract. Those are the three places in a tender where a supplier wins or loses.

Every reason to build a passport so far has come from a regulator. This is the first EU text in which the reason comes from a customer.

Where your goods come from is expected to sit in the passport too

The origin duty is in Article 28(4) of the same proposal, the article on proving eligibility. Its second subparagraph: “If required for applying requirements under Article 73(2), economic operators shall indicate the country of origin of the goods that compose their tender, incorporating it, where applicable, into the digital product passport of the goods pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2024/1781.”

Article 73(2) is the European preference machinery. A public buyer may require the goods offered to originate in the Union, may award extra points or apply a notional price reduction to tenders with a higher Union content, and may reject a tender where Union or covered goods are worth less than 50% of its estimated value. Article 74 sets out how origin is determined, pointing at the Union Customs Code for goods. The passport, in other words, is being lined up to carry a commercial fact and not only an environmental one.

Article 28(4) also has teeth. Where an economic operator fails to provide the origin information without reasonable explanation, and thereby makes verification impossible or very difficult, the operator or its tender may be excluded from the procedure.

For eight named regulations, green criteria stop being the buyer's choice

Article 54 is the one that says “shall”. When a public buyer purchases products, product families or technologies covered by the acts in Annex VII, it must require environmental characteristics in the specifications, the award criteria or the contract performance conditions, and must express them in the classes, levels of performance, thresholds or sustainability requirements laid down in those acts. Annex VII lists eight regulations. The first five:

• Regulation (EU) 2024/3110, the Construction Products Regulation
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, the ESPR, which is where the Digital Product Passport comes from
• Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 on batteries and waste batteries
• Regulation (EU) 2025/40 on packaging and packaging waste
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1735, the Net-Zero Industry Act

Then the two CO₂ regulations for heavy-duty vehicles and for cars and vans, and the tyre labelling regulation. Construction products come first on that list, which matters because public works are the largest thing public buyers buy. Article 54(2) lets the Commission fix the exact characteristics by delegated act, and no such delegated act exists. Article 54(3) lets a buyer step around one in two narrow cases: a single possible supplier with no reasonable substitute, or disproportionate cost and technical incompatibility.

For a manufacturer the practical reading is short. The performance classes that come out of your sector's ESPR delegated act would stop being only a condition of placing goods on the market. They would become the vocabulary of the tender.

The ESPR's own procurement article is being taken out of the ESPR

Article 147(1) of the proposal amends Regulation (EU) 2024/1781: “Article 65 is deleted; in Article 74(3), point (b) is deleted.” References to those two provisions would then be read as references to Articles 54 and 26(1)(a) of the new Regulation.

The same article does the same to four more instruments: Article 85 of the Batteries Regulation, Article 83 of the Construction Products Regulation, Article 63 of the packaging regulation, and Article 25(4) and (5) of the Net-Zero Industry Act. The Commission's stated reason is that five sectoral instruments each grew their own separate powers to set green procurement requirements, and that the result is uncoordinated.

If you follow one regulation closely because it governs your products, that is the part to notice. The procurement rules attached to it would move into a different act, and the reference you have bookmarked would point at a deleted article.

There is no date, and the proposal does not pretend otherwise

Article 149 says the Regulation would enter into force twenty days after publication in the Official Journal and apply from a date two years after that. In the published text that date is still a bracketed instruction to the Publications Office, because entry into force has not happened and cannot yet be scheduled.

The file sits at the beginning of the ordinary legislative procedure. The Council registered it on 10 September 2026 as document 12969/26. In Parliament, procedure file 2026/0265(COD) is at preparatory phase, with the responsible committee and the rapporteur both recorded as pending. Parliament and Council can change any of the text quoted in this article, and usually do.

One further limit is worth knowing, because it decides whether any of this reaches you at all. The Regulation would apply above the EU thresholds set in Article 2: EUR 140 000 for supplies and services bought by central government bodies, EUR 216 000 for sub-central buyers, EUR 432 000 in the utilities sectors, EUR 750 000 for social, health and educational services, and EUR 5 404 000 for works and concessions. Below those values, national procurement rules govern.

What is worth doing while this is still a proposal

Not much. Two things cost almost nothing, though, and would be useful whatever happens to this text.

The first is to know whether your products fall under one of the Annex VII acts. Construction products, batteries, packaging and net-zero technologies are named directly. For everything else the route runs through the ESPR and its delegated acts, and we keep the dates and the movements in our regulatory changelog.

The second is to check whether your product data could actually produce a declaration on demand. Article 92 asks for a declaration of conformity delivered through a passport. A company that keeps its declarations as PDFs in a shared drive complies perfectly well with product law today, and would still have a month of work ahead of it on the day a buyer asks the question in this form.

Public procurement is around 15% of the EU's gross domestic product, according to the explanatory memorandum attached to this proposal. That is the size of the customer that has just been given a reason to ask about the passport. It has not asked yet. If you supply construction products or any other Annex VII group, the cheapest moment to get the data in order is before it does.