Digital Product Passport for construction products

The regulation fixes no date. The Commission first has to set up the passport system with an act of its own. No deadline applies to that. Once the act is in force, two clocks start. After six months the system has to run. After eighteen months manufacturers have to make the passport available. The Commission plans the act for the second quarter of 2027. If the plan holds, the duty applies from late 2028 or 2029. In Transpareo you can create your product passports today.

Not yet. The duties apply to products covered by a harmonised technical specification or a European technical assessment. The new regulation replaces the old standards family by family. The Commission’s working plan sets the order. For many products the passport arrives with the specification of their product family. Specifications under the 2011 regulation do not count for this. Cement, building limes and other hydraulic binders come first. Their standards are planned to become mandatory in the fourth quarter of 2027. For chimneys, other than free-standing ones, the plan names 2028. For doors and windows, flat glass, reinforcing and prestressing steel, thermal insulation and structural timber products it names 2029. Precast concrete and structural metallic products were requested under the old regulation. The plan itself calls all of these years indicative.

Importers have duties of their own. They may place only compliant products on the market. In some cases they count as the manufacturer themselves. That happens when they sell under their own name or brand. It also happens when they change the declared use or claim different characteristics. Private-label building materials are common. So this catches more importers than many expect. Settle the data flow in the supply contract, before the first audit comes. With a supplier request in Transpareo, your producer delivers the data straight into your product passport.

That is the normal case in this industry. What is required is a unique code of the product type and, where one exists, a batch or serial number. A GTIN is no part of it. If you have a GTIN, Transpareo turns it into a GS1 Digital Link. If you have none, Transpareo issues a unique identifier of its own. Transpareo produces the QR code either way. Some products cannot carry a code themselves, such as aggregates in bulk. Then the code goes onto a label, the packaging or the accompanying documents. A passport may also be connected to more than one code. More on this in how the DPP works without a GTIN.

Yes, and it has to. Cement, concrete and aggregates change from delivery to delivery. That is why the regulation asks for a batch or serial number alongside the type code. In Transpareo you publish the passport per product, batch or item. The QR code on a delivery note then leads to the composition of exactly that batch. That is what makes a later deconstruction audit possible.

The passport contains the declaration of performance and more. The regulation lists what a construction passport carries. The declaration of performance and conformity comes first. Then come the product and safety information, the technical documentation, the label and the unique identifiers. The declaration is the core. The passport holds it in a structured, machine-readable form, with rules on who may read what.

The regulation does not require an EPD. It works with a fixed list of environmental characteristics over the life cycle. They are calculated with free software from the Commission. The regulation mentions the standard EN 15804 only once, in its recitals. There it is a source for that software, with the words “or future applicable standards”. If you already hold an EPD, its data covers most of the list. Many manufacturers keep their figures with a programme operator or in a national building materials database. That data is the practical starting point. For some years the same figures will live in three places, the EPD, the declaration and the passport. Where your own data is missing, European background data applies. The Commission deliberately keeps it conservative. Bringing your own data means declaring the figures of your own plant. In Transpareo the EPD sits as a field of its own beside the figures.

The construction passport is a system of its own, deliberately built on the general product passport. It has to be compatible with the passport of the Ecodesign Regulation. Its rules on identifiers, the registry and the web portal apply to construction products too. The construction act may set different rules. A company that already runs product passports for another product group adapts them. In Transpareo you keep the passports of every product group on one platform.

Your company’s identity verification. Only a verified company can register a passport. Who registers construction products is for their act to set. A company in the EU proves its identity with a qualified electronic seal. A qualified electronic attestation of attributes works as well. The verified status lasts three years at most. It ends earlier if the seal or the attestation expires. Then the verification is repeated. The registry has run since 20 July 2026 and offers a test environment. On registration it checks the data structure and the level of the passport, that is model, batch or item. Whether the values are right remains for market surveillance to check. Today your company makes the entry. A service provider cannot do it for you yet. We expect that to change. Transpareo checks every passport before publication and prepares the details the entry needs.

The regulation names Building Information Modelling (BIM) explicitly. The passport system must not compromise working with digital building models. The details are for the construction act to set. In practice your product data has to leave the passport in structured form. A planning model has to be able to take it in, and a PDF cannot do that. An obvious route is for the model to store the passport identifier per component. It then fetches the other values through it when a calculation needs them. They will be needed soon. From 2028 the EU buildings directive requires a life-cycle climate figure for large new buildings. The Commission’s working plan sees the passport as support for this, for digital building logbooks and for BIM. Transpareo makes every passport machine-readable at a permanent address.

Today no procurement law prescribes one. The values a passport carries count more and more in tenders, though. Contracts covering net-zero technologies come with minimum sustainability requirements. In 2026 the Commission put forward two proposals. Publicly bought steel, cement and aluminium would have to meet carbon requirements. Quality would weigh at least 30 per cent in every award. In Switzerland, Swiss Federal Railways weight the carbon footprint of rails at 25 per cent. A published passport in Transpareo shows the public values at a permanent address. A bid can include them as a link or a QR code.

The construction act sets the exact period. The regulation already sets the frame. The passport system has to be accessible for 25 years after the last product of a type. The company makes the passport available for at least ten years. The passport has to stay available even after an insolvency or a closure. For that, the regulation provides for a back-up system run by the providers. The details follow in the act. Buildings outlive their suppliers. So ask every provider what happens to your passports after a cancellation. With Transpareo they stay reachable through a permanent address. Our provider checklist names more questions worth asking.