Public tenders are starting to ask for proof. The DPP is the proof.

Public buyers spend a substantial share of EU GDP, and their tender criteria are shifting from price alone towards verifiable sustainability. The ESPR reinforces this with green-public-procurement provisions that can make environmental criteria mandatory for public purchases of regulated products. For suppliers, that changes the game: the question is no longer whether you claim sustainability, but whether you can hand the evaluator structured, sealed, independently checkable evidence. That is what a Digital Product Passport is.

Last updated: 17 July 2026

Public money is going green — by rule, not preference

Public procurement is one of the EU's largest levers for market change, and contracting authorities across member states increasingly weight environmental performance in award criteria: recycled content, durability, repairability, carbon data. The ESPR — Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 — adds teeth: it contains green-public-procurement provisions under which the Commission can set mandatory sustainability requirements for public purchases of products covered by ecodesign rules. The detailed criteria will come with implementing measures and are still taking shape, so treat specifics as evolving — but the direction is set. Suppliers to schools, hospitals, municipalities, ministries and public utilities should expect sustainability evidence to move from "nice to attach" to a scored, and eventually gating, part of the bid.

Why a sealed passport beats a sustainability PDF

Evaluators face a practical problem: every bidder claims to be sustainable. What separates evidence from marketing is verifiability, and a Digital Product Passport is built for it:

• Structured — defined data fields, not prose, so criteria can be checked point by point and compared across bidders.
• Sealed — eIDAS qualified sealing makes the record tamper-evident and attributable to your legal entity, not to a document anyone could edit.
• Registered and independently hosted — filed in the EU DPP Registry and resolvable via a GS1 Digital Link QR at a stable address, so the evaluator inspects the same record the market authority would, without going through your sales team.

A brochure asks to be believed; a passport can be checked. In a scored evaluation, that difference is points.

How suppliers use passports to win — and keep — public contracts

In practice, the passport works at three moments of the procurement cycle. At bid time, it answers sustainability questionnaires with a link to structured, sealed data instead of a hurried document hunt — and lets you substantiate award-criteria claims your competitors can only assert. At delivery, it demonstrates the goods placed under the contract are the goods described in the bid, with conformity data attached to each product. During the contract term, it gives the authority ongoing access to current data — relevant for framework agreements that run for years and get audited. Suppliers who industrialise this once, rather than rebuilding evidence per tender, bid faster and defend renewals better.

The other side of the ledger: exclusion as a compliance cost

Discussion of DPP non-compliance usually stops at fines — which member states set individually — and at customs detention or market withdrawal. For suppliers to the public sector there is a heavier cost: losing eligibility. Products that cannot lawfully be placed on the EU market cannot be delivered under a public contract, and EU procurement rules allow authorities to exclude operators with demonstrated breaches of environmental obligations. A compliance failure thus converts into lost revenue across every public account you hold. PassPer builds the passport from documents you already have — spec sheets, certificates, supplier declarations — with AI extraction and human review, seals it, registers it, and keeps it accessible for the product's regulated lifetime. Run the free readiness check to see where your tender evidence stands today.

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