The EU is not just asking products to last longer — it is building the information infrastructure to make repair possible. ESPR names repairability and durability among its horizontal priorities, and the digital product passport is where the repair-relevant facts live: spare parts, disassembly information, repair scores where product rules require them. Here is what the passport will carry, who gets to read it, and what makers should be assembling now.
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The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, in force since July 2024 — does two things at once. It names priority product groups (textiles, furniture including mattresses, tyres, iron and steel, aluminium in the first working plan of April 2025), and it establishes horizontal requirements — including repairability and durability — that can cut across product groups, electronics included. So even a maker whose products are not in the first wave can find repair-related ecodesign requirements arriving via the horizontal route.
The logic is straightforward: a product that cannot be repaired is a product that gets replaced, and the regulation exists to change that default. The specific requirements — what must be repairable, for how long, with what parts — are set per product group in delegated acts, so the details are delegated-act-dependent. The priority itself is not.
Rules create duties; the passport makes them usable. The DPP is the standard carrier for the repair-relevant facts about a specific product, reachable by scanning its QR code. Depending on what the applicable delegated act requires, expect the repair layer of a passport to include:
The honest caveat, as always with ESPR: the exact field list for your products is fixed by your product group's delegated act. The pattern — repair data travels with the product, digitally — is already settled.
Not all passport data is public, and repair information is a textbook case for tiering. A consumer scanning a QR code sees the public layer; a professional repairer, as an actor with a legitimate role, is among those intended to receive restricted-tier access to deeper technical content — detailed disassembly procedures, service information, spare-part data. The same tiered model serves recyclers and market-surveillance authorities, each seeing what their role justifies.
For makers this reframes an old fear. Publishing repair information has long felt like handing know-how to the world; tiered passport access means the audience is controlled — repair professionals get what they need, and the passport records that the maker met the requirement. For the broader access model, see who can see DPP data.
Beyond ecodesign, the EU has been legislating to make repair the easy choice — nudging sellers and producers towards repairing rather than replacing, and improving consumers' access to repair. The precise obligations and timing vary by instrument and product, so we will not pin dates on it here; the direction, though, is unambiguous, and it points at the same asset every time: repair information, structured and accessible.
The preparation list is concrete. Inventory the repair documentation you already have — service manuals, exploded views, spare-part lists — and note the gaps. Get disassembly knowledge out of engineers' heads and into documents. Then structure it: this is exactly the material PassPer's AI extraction turns into passport-ready data, from the spec sheets and manuals you already hold, with human review before anything is sealed and published. Start with the free readiness check to see how your current documentation measures up.
Take the 2-minute readiness check, watch the 10-minute interactive walkthrough, or download the full 2026 compliance guide. No account needed.