What a Digital Product Passport actually looks like — field by field

Almost everything written about the Digital Product Passport is explanation. What it is, which regulation introduces it, when it takes effect. Rarely does anyone show the passport itself — and the passport is what your customer will actually see.

So this piece explains nothing. We open a finished passport and go through it field by field.

The product is a three-seat sofa, 220×95×85 cm, 68 kg, on the market since January 2025, made by a Bulgarian manufacturer. The brand is illustrative and the passport is a demonstration — built the way it would look for a real producer, and publicly accessible. (It is written in Bulgarian; everything in it is described below.)

The first three seconds

Four indicators sit at the top, before any scrolling: 78% recyclability, 40% FSC-certified wood, a 142 kg CO₂ footprint, and "no substances of concern". Three are marked "good"; the carbon figure is marked "average".

That is a deliberate design decision. The passport does not bury its weakest number behind the strong ones. A buyer who sees an honest self-assessment believes the other figures too.

The footprint is translated into something human: 142 kg CO₂ ≈ 710 km by car. 380 litres of water ≈ 2.5 baths. The raw number means nothing to someone buying a sofa.

The materials: the percentage is not the interesting part

Composition is broken into seven components, each with an origin and a certificate: beech 35% (Bulgaria, FSC 100%), polyurethane foam 25% (Bulgaria, CertiPUR-US), polyester upholstery 18% (Turkey, 60% recycled, GRS), spring-block steel 12% (Bulgaria, 85% recycled), oak legs 5%, water-based adhesive 3% (Germany), fasteners 2% (Italy, 90% recycled).

Total recycled content is 24%. But the more useful figures are underneath it: the steel is 85% recycled and the fasteners 90%. When a delegated act introduces recycled-content thresholds, a manufacturer with that breakdown already knows where it stands. A manufacturer with one blended number does not.

The locked part

The supply chain shows ten stages — from timber harvesting, through textile production in Izmir, to packaging in Plovdiv. And beside every stage sits a padlock: "for professionals".

This is probably the most underrated part of the whole regulation. A passport is not a public document into which you pour everything. The data is tiered: the consumer sees composition, safety and care; the professional sees suppliers and the LCA methodology; the market surveillance authority sees what it needs to verify.

The objection we hear most often is "I do not want my competitors seeing my suppliers." The answer is not a promise — it is in the architecture. The same applies to the assessment methodology: the standard is named (EN 16760:2015), but the report itself sits behind the same padlock.

The numbers that actually sell

The durability section does not read like regulation. It reads like a product sheet: 15 years expected lifetime, 350 kg maximum load, 80,000 Martindale cycles on the upholstery, fire performance to EN 1021-1, testing to EN 12520:2015.

Below it: spare parts guaranteed available until 2032. Cushions, upholstery in several colours, legs, spring mechanism. Service centres in three cities plus ten authorised partners.

None of this was invented for the passport. A good manufacturer already knows all of it — it has simply never been shown in one place, in language the buyer understands.

End of life is part of the sale

The end-of-life section lists a route for each material: the beech frame becomes wood chips for board production, the steel springs go to ferrous recycling, the upholstery to mechanical textile recycling, the foam to chemical recycling back into polyols.

There is also a warning: the foam contains a phosphorus-based flame retardant and requires specialised treatment. A passport that omits that is less useful to a recycler than one that states it.

And finally the number that turns all of this into a commercial argument: a full workshop refurbishment for roughly 30% of the price of a new sofa. That is not an environmental message. That is residual value — and it is why the secondary market for such a product is stronger.

What this means for your product

If you go through the sofa passport carefully, you will notice that almost nothing in it is new knowledge. Composition, certificates, test results, the service network, spare-part availability — all of it exists somewhere inside the company. In specifications, in test reports, in the head of the production engineer.

In roughly 90% of cases the work is not collecting new data. It is collecting existing data in one place, in a structure a machine can read.

Which is why the practical rule does not change: do not wait for the delegated act covering your product group. Whoever organises their data now meets the deadline prepared — and in the meantime has a product page most of their competitors do not.

Look through the sofa passport yourself. There is a second one, for a winter jacket, showing how the same structure works for textiles.