Most brand manufacturers now know they need a Declaration of Conformity for their packaging. Far fewer know that the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a separate system with its own rules, its own registry, and its own obligations that apply to a different, much smaller slice of the market. The two regulations share a data foundation, but treating them as one compliance checklist is where most PIM and PLM projects go wrong.
In this PIMvendors.com webinar, Stephan Spijkers (Co-Founder, PIMvendors.com) sits down with Hans de Gier (Founder, SyncForce) and Paul Oudenhooven-Pluijmert (Business Development Director, SyncForce) to answer the question brand manufacturers keep asking as PPWR and DPP timelines start to overlap: can one data model support both? The conversation covers the real scope of DPP obligations, the myths still circulating about packaging passports, and the three-entity data structure SyncForce now builds around: sales unit, product, and packaging system.
Speakers:
Stephan Spijkers – Co-Founder, PIMvendors.com
Hans de Gier – Founder, SyncForce
Paul Oudenhooven-Pluijmert – Business Development Director, SyncForce
The full session is available on the PIMvendors YouTube channel. If your organization has lumped PPWR and DPP into a single project plan without checking whether both actually apply, this session addresses the scoping question most compliance guides skip.
DPP and PPWR meet at the sales unit, not before. SyncForce’s data model splits every item you sell into three layers: the sales unit (what beeps at the register), the product inside it, and the packaging system around it. PPWR governs the packaging layer and stops there. The DPP governs the product layer and never touches the sales unit. There is no packaging passport, no packaging registry, and no unique packaging identifier anywhere in the DPP framework, despite how often that claim circulates online.
Only three product categories carry a DPP obligation today. The first wave covers electric vehicles, light means of transport such as e-bikes and e-scooters, and industrial batteries above 2 kWh. Home batteries, laptops, and mobile phones are excluded. Food, pet food, and pharmaceuticals are excluded from the DPP entirely, which removes 70 to 80 percent of most packaged goods manufacturers’ portfolios from the obligation, even though PPWR packaging rules still apply to every one of those products.
The digital product passport is a structured dataset, not a landing page. Six of the eight harmonized standards needed to build DPP infrastructure are now published, and the EU registry is live for registration. What they describe is a machine-readable, version-controlled dataset with public and private access layers, transferred through an open network, not a branded microsite behind a QR code that a marketing team can populate freely. Free-text sustainability content and brand storytelling sit outside the passport, not inside it.
A single packaging system can now replace hundreds of duplicate compliance records. Treating every sales unit as its own compliance object doesn’t scale: one SyncForce customer’s packaging system covers 487 sales units across 37 brands and 11 manufacturers, all inheriting the same declaration of conformity instead of 487 separate ones. The same logic applies upstream, since a component like a sock or a charger gets its own identifier before anyone knows which sales unit it will end up in, ruling out the GTIN as a usable identifier at that level.
Item-level data introduces a lifespan-management problem PIM systems haven’t faced before. A DPP has to stay live for as long as the product exists in the field, five to ten years for packaging under PPWR and potentially longer for item-level passports on things like home batteries and vehicles, which write their own usage and charge history back to the passport over time. Marketing teams used to retiring a product page after one season now need that same data reachable a decade later, with public and repair-only access layers clearly separated.
Most 2027 deadlines apply to fewer categories than the headlines suggest. The battery passport is the first DPP obligation live, targeted for February 18, 2027, and it only touches the three categories above. Textile DPP requirements are not due for market introduction until 2029. The one firm 2027 date that applies broadly is the shift to GS1-compliant QR codes on sales unit barcodes by the end of that year, and that migration is optional, not mandatory.
👉 Not sure whether PPWR, the DPP, or both apply to your portfolio?
Visit pimvendors.com for the full recap and related articles, or get in touch with SyncForce to map your sales unit, product, and packaging identifiers before the next deadline forces the conversation.
