Introducing the Digital Product Passport

Finding relevant content in a world of too much information

Users of technical devices increasingly struggle to find information that is actually relevant to their situation. The problem is rarely a lack of information. Instead, users typically have access to too much information, while only a small portion is relevant in a given situation, depending on the exact product configuration, the task being performed, and the role of the user.

At the heart of the problem is a mismatch between how technical information is produced and how it is used. Documentation is often created and delivered at product-family level: large manuals or portals designed to cover "everything" – including descriptions and instructions for every optional function a product may have. But the user rarely needs everything. In most situations, the user needs one correct instruction that applies to this exact product configuration in this exact situation.

This places the most difficult part of the information process on the user: identifying what is relevant by excluding what is not. That exclusion requires product knowledge, patience, and strong reading skills. It may also require understanding how the product is modularized and how the documentation library is structured. Yet, users often do not know where to start, which manuals apply, or how to determine whether a specific procedure fits their configured product.

In practice, users must search across multiple content delivery sources, open and scan multiple manuals, interpret headings, and compare procedures that look similar. The burden is on the user to judge what is relevant.

This creates significant operational consequences. Users may fail to find relevant content. They may become frustrated, give up, and continue working without the necessary guidance. Or – most dangerously – they may follow information that seems relevant but is not. Incorrect procedures and wrong configuration assumptions can cause equipment damage, downtime, safety incidents, and legal exposure.

Even when no damage occurs, uncertainty is costly. Users who are unsure whether the content they found truly applies may hesitate, work more slowly, or avoid tasks altogether. In all these cases, poor access to relevant and trusted information reduces efficiency and increases risk.

In short: Modern technical communication often delivers available information, but users need relevant information.
 

Why relevance is vital

Quickly accessing relevant content – and being confident that it is the relevant content – has always been essential for usability and operational performance. But today it has become vital for another reason: climate change.

To understand why relevance matters in addressing climate change, we must take a step back. The user’s struggle with finding relevant content is not only an information design problem – it is part of a larger societal and political challenge: how to build systems that reduce resource extraction and environmental harm.

Political organizations such as the European Union have positioned this as part of a broader economic transformation. The solution is not simply “recycle more.” Instead, the EU promotes a systemic transition toward a circular economy, where products and materials remain in use longer and at higher value.
 

The bigger picture of the circular economy

The circular economy aims to build a restorative system that rebuilds natural capital and recovers products and materials for further use. In such a system, products and components are kept in biological and technical loops at their highest value and utility over multiple lifetimes. The goal is not only recycling. It is to maintain value by extending use.

To reduce the carbon footprint, products need to be used much longer than they are today – potentially an order of magnitude longer. Products should not be discarded because of minor malfunctions, worn parts, or missing maintenance. Instead, the circular economy relies on repair, reuse, refurbishment, and remanufacturing.

However, these strategies only work if users have reliable operational knowledge. Information becomes the enabling infrastructure. If technicians cannot identify the correct repair procedure, if refurbishers cannot confirm component compatibility, or if recyclers cannot safely dismantle products, the "circle" breaks.

When relevant information is difficult to find, the cost of repair increases – not only financial costs, but also time, effort, and uncertainty. This pushes behavior in the wrong direction: replacement instead of repair, disposal instead of refurbishment, and waste instead of reuse. In this way, the lack of relevant information becomes a sustainability barrier.

Worse still, users may act on incorrect information while believing it is correct. That can lead to unsafe actions, equipment damage, or the destruction of reusable value – undermining circular processes and increasing environmental impact.
 

A typical example: Acting on irrelevant information

To illustrate the difficulty of finding relevant content in a traditional technical documentation delivery environment, consider the following scenario:

A warehouse company orders an XL-8000 forklift from the manufacturer Elemate. The forklifts are not standardized, off-the-shelf products. They are configured-to-order systems. The buyer selects model family, battery type, and options such as radio, interior lights, and airbag. Every selection changes the product configuration – and therefore changes which information is relevant. The configured forklift is subsequently manufactured and delivered as a specific, serial-numbered unit.

Later, when the forklift is in operation, a service engineer must check the battery condition. The engineer has access to Elemate’s complete online documentation portal: manuals, parts catalogs, and troubleshooting guides, across multiple models and model years. The problem is not access to information. The problem is relevance.

Only a small part of the available documentation applies to the specific, serial-numbered forklift ordered by the warehouse. Yet the service engineer must find it by searching and reading. To succeed, the engineer must first locate the correct information source, such as a service manual. They must then formulate search queries (for example, keywords or an AI prompt), evaluate the results, determine which instruction is relevant, understand it, and finally perform the procedure.

This becomes increasingly difficult as product variability increases. In this scenario, the engineer finds an instruction that appears relevant. But after following the procedure, the task fails. The reason is that the instruction applies to a different battery type than the one configured in this specific serial-numbered forklift.

This scenario demonstrates a structural problem: Documentation is often produced for product models, while users need information that applies to a specific manufactured product instance. As documentation libraries grow, users spend more time filtering and judging relevance. The result is frustration, inefficiency, downtime, and increased risk.
 

The EU response: Digital Product Passports

To support circular economy goals, many stakeholders must be able to access relevant information efficiently: A consumer needs information about climate impact, such as carbon footprint, when choosing between comparable products. A repair technician must quickly retrieve the correct procedure. A refurbisher needs to identify compatible replacements. A recycler must access material composition and disassembly constraints.

To address this need, the EU has initiated the concept of Digital Product Passports (DPPs). The Digital Product Passport is introduced through the EU’s sustainability agenda and is connected to the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). ESPR provides a framework enabling product groups to be required to provide digital passports.

The ambition is to make key product information accessible across the lifecycle, for different stakeholders, in a way that supports repair, reuse, and responsible end-of-life treatment.

But the Digital Product Passport can also be understood as a direct response to the relevance problem described above. Instead of giving users access to broad documentation libraries and forcing them to judge relevance by excluding what is not relevant, the Digital Product Passport aims to deliver information that is already tied to a specific, serial-numbered unit.
 

What a Digital Product Passport is (and what it is not)

A Digital Product Passport is a structured digital information resource linked to a product identity. It is typically accessed through a QR code or similar carrier placed on the physical product. The passport enables stakeholders to retrieve product-specific information in a scalable and controlled way.

One useful way to understand Digital Product Passports is to describe them in three layers:

1. Identification layer. Information that uniquely identifies the product and its passport (for example, product identifier, serial number, and link mechanism). This ensures users retrieve the correct passport for the correct product unit.
2. Core descriptive layer. Technical information related to the product unit. This is where technical communicators contribute most directly, providing descriptions, instructions, safety information, and similar content. The information must be valid for the specific product unit, but it can also be applicable to many other units depending on the configuration.
3. Lifecycle and event layer. Information linked to a specific manufactured product unit (or batch of units) over time – such as service history, repairs, and replaced components.

This layered structure is essential because it allows Digital Product Passports to combine reusable documentation content with serial-number-specific data. A Digital Product Passport is therefore not “one document.” It is a delivery concept for lifecycle product information.
 

Implementing Digital Product Passports through technical communication

For technical communicators, the key takeaway is that Digital Product Passports can be integrated and delivered using the same principles and tools already established in structured content environments – provided we evolve from manual-centric publishing toward dynamic, metadata-driven content delivery.

One practical implementation to deliver Digital Product Passports is outlined below, requiring three core capabilities in the technical communication delivery chain.

1. Metadata-rich structured and modular content. The technical communication authoring and content management process should support the delivery of modular content units (such as standalone user topics) enriched with metadata, as this structure enables dynamic filtering of content for a specific product serial number. This metadata can describe aspects such as product component applicability, information type, task type, user role, and product model. Delivering standalone user topics does not mean that each topic must exist as a separate file in the CCMS. Technical writers can instead work in larger source files where multiple user topics are embedded and later separated during publishing. Working this way can reduce complexity for authors, since each individual CCMS file carries administrative overhead – it must be created, stored, version-managed, and retrieved.
2. Management and access to serial-number-specific product data. The Digital Product Passport must include information specific to each manufactured product unit. However, from an authoring and information ownership perspective, content in the CCMS must remain reusable across products and therefore avoid serial-number-specific information. One way to address this is to use variable placeholders in the CCMS-managed content for information that varies by serial number. At delivery time, the content delivery portal retrieves the relevant data for each manufactured unit and uses it to populate these placeholders. This setup requires integration with enterprise systems that manage configuration and product-specific data, such as PDM/PLM systems, PIM systems, order systems, or service databases. As the Digital Product Passport initiative at EU level emphasizes data federation, not duplication, the delivery portal should query such backend systems to fetch this data.
3. A content delivery portal that supports filtering. Digital Product Passports should be delivered through a content portal that supports faceted search and configuration-based filtering driven by metadata. This enables the portal to dynamically present the relevant information based on product identity, such as a serial number. This is possible because each product serial number (or batch of serial numbers) corresponds to a defined set of configured product components. When the user is asking to view content, the delivery portal retrieves this data for the manufactured unit from the backend systems, including the specific component options installed. The list of component options installed is then used to filter the content so that users only see topics applicable to that serial number. In this approach, order-specific content delivery is handled locally within the portal rather than centrally from the CCMS.

The connection between the manufactured product unit and its passport can be achieved through a GS1 Digital Link. This link can encode domain, GTIN, serial number, and other identifiers to create a lifecycle-stable URL, which is then printed as a QR code on the product. A URL resolver layer then connects the GS1 Digital Link to a portal URL that activates the appropriate product configuration for content filtering.

From a technical communication perspective, this is a natural extension of the XML CCMS toolchain. Metadata, reuse, conditionality, and publishing pipelines already exist in many organizations. Initiatives such as iiRDS provide additional standards and frameworks that support this type of delivery. What changes is the delivery target: Instead of publishing static manuals, we deliver dynamically filtered information experiences connected to product identity and optimized for real tasks.

In the longer term, AI-assisted question answering may also be layered on top. In that context, serial-number-specific product information can support retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reduce the risk of hallucinations. But such solutions only become trustworthy when built on governed, structured content and reliable filtering. For Digital Product Passports, correctness is not optional.
 

Digital Product Passports expand the scope of technical communication

Digital Product Passports are often framed as regulatory obligations. But for technical communicators, they represent something larger: a shift in what “documentation” means.

Digital Product Passports require technical communication to move beyond manuals and into lifecycle information delivery – where product identity, configuration, structured content, and portal delivery converge.

In this future, technical communicators are not peripheral. We are central. Because the core problem is not only whether information exists, but whether it is relevant, usable, and trusted – and these are exactly the areas where our field has deep competence and mature methods.