Four people scan the same code, and only one of them bought the product.
Most discussion of Digital Product Passports imagines a curious shopper in a shop. That reader exists, but they are one of four, and they are not the one who can stop your goods at a border. A passport is read by consumers, by customs and market-surveillance authorities, by recyclers and waste operators, and by repairers and second-hand buyers — each looking for something different, each with a different level of access, and each in their own language.
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In one line: a passport has four real audiences — consumers, authorities, recyclers and repairers — access tiers give each of them a different slice of the same record, and only one of those four is likely to be reading English by choice.
Four readers, one code
Everything about how a passport should be designed follows from who actually opens it. There are four groups, and they want almost nothing in common.
Consumers — before purchase they are checking that a claim is real: origin, materials, durability, whether the thing can be repaired at all. After purchase they come back for care instructions, warranty and what to do when it breaks. They scan on a phone, in a shop, with about fifteen seconds of patience.
Customs and market-surveillance authorities — they are verifying, not browsing. Does this consignment have a passport at all, does the identifier resolve, do the declared values match the documentation and the goods in front of them. They read at the border or during an inspection, under time pressure, in their own working language.
Recyclers and waste operators — they need composition, hazardous substances and how the product comes apart. This is a safety question before it is an environmental one: what is inside, what must not go into the shredder, where the battery is.
Repairers and second-hand buyers — spare-part identification, disassembly sequence, and for batteries the state of health. A second-hand buyer is asking something simpler: is this genuine, and what condition is it really in.
The readers you cannot reach any other way
Two of the four are worth dwelling on, because you have no other channel to them.
An authority reader is the reason the passport is a regulated object rather than a marketing page. Market-surveillance authorities and customs can check goods at the point of entry and in the market; where products do not comply, goods can be detained and withdrawal ordered, and penalties are set nationally by each member state. That reader is an official of one specific country performing a legal act — a poor moment to hand them a screen they have to translate themselves.
A recycler reads the passport years after you have forgotten the product existed: potentially a decade or more later, in a country you never shipped to, in a facility you have no relationship with. Passports are expected to stay accessible for the product’s regulated lifetime, which for some groups runs to fifteen years. Everything that reader needs must be legible without you being available to explain it.
Access tiers mean each one sees a different passport
The four do not all see the same data, and that is deliberate. The passport is layered, with the exact allocation of fields set per product group in its delegated act, so treat this as the shape rather than a fixed template.
Public — what anyone scanning the QR code gets: product identity, a materials summary, circularity and care information. Consumers and second-hand buyers live here.
Restricted — granted by role to parties with a legitimate interest: professional repairers and recyclers getting disassembly detail, fuller composition and hazard information.
Authority — the compliance-critical detail for market surveillance and customs, visible to regulators rather than to the market.
An English-only passport assumes all four read English
Line the four readers up and the language question answers itself. The consumer is in the market where the product was sold. The authority is a national official. The recycler is wherever the product ended its life. The second-hand buyer may be two countries from the original sale. Only your own staff were ever guaranteed to read English.
EU product law generally expects information intended for consumers and authorities to be available in the language of the member state where the product is placed on the market, and the passport-specific detail is expected to be fixed per product group by delegated acts. You do not need the final wording to see the design consequence: the structure of the passport should render in the reader’s language automatically, because you cannot know in advance which of the four is holding the product. That is why PassPer renders the field structure in eight EU languages, chosen from the scanning device’s own preference.
Frequently asked questions
Do consumers really scan product passports?
Some do, and the number will rise as codes appear on more products — but consumer scanning is not the test. Authorities, recyclers and repairers rely on the passport whether or not shoppers ever open it, and it is the authority reader who can hold a consignment. Design for the reader with powers, not the one with curiosity.
Does a recycler get to see data we consider confidential?
They get what they need to process the product safely — composition, hazardous substances, disassembly — through the restricted tier, granted by role rather than published openly. Commercially sensitive detail such as your full bill of materials or named supplier relationships sits deeper, where competitors cannot reach it.
Which of the four audiences determines the language?
None of them individually, which is precisely the point. You cannot know who will scan a product that has already left your control, so the safe design is one passport whose structure renders in whichever language the reader’s device asks for, rather than a guess about your typical reader.
Do we have to build a separate passport for each audience?
No. It is one passport with one identifier and one record; the access tier a reader qualifies for decides which slice they see. Building audience-specific passports would fragment the identifier and create exactly the divergence the framework is designed to avoid.