Glossary
ESPR & Digital Product Passport
Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation
The EU framework that sets ecodesign requirements per product group and attaches a machine-readable Digital Product Passport to each item.
ESPR (Regulation 2024/1781) replaced the old Ecodesign Directive and widened it from energy use to durability, reparability, recycled content and recyclability. It is a framework regulation: the binding rules arrive product group by product group through delegated acts.
The Digital Product Passport is its data layer: a machine-readable record, reachable from the product itself, carrying composition, repair and compliance information across the product’s life. The EU central DPP registry went live on 19 July 2026.
For electronics the sequencing matters more than the headline. Reparability is expected as an early horizontal requirement, with consumer electronics and small appliances among the first groups addressed, while electronics-specific delegated acts and their transition periods push mandatory compliance toward the end of the decade.
The practical consequence for a repair operation is that per-device history stops being an internal quality record and becomes a regulatory deliverable. Workshops that already capture repair history serial by serial will have the data; those that track by lot will not.