We audited our own 12 category templates against a single question: for every field marked “required”, which EU instrument actually requires it? Of 307 required fields, 46 rested on authority that is not legislative — an EN standard, a certification scheme, a non-EU convention, or in three cases the phrase “Product specification”. We corrected all 46. Every remaining required field cites legislation.
We are naming our own defect first because it is the most useful thing on this page. A compliance vendor that tells you a law exists when it does not is the worst failure mode in this category: you spend real effort chasing an obligation nobody can enforce, and you learn to distrust the fields that genuinely are mandatory.
The rule underneath is simple. A field in a Digital Product Passport is legally mandatory only when two things hold at once: an EU instrument that is in force mandates the data, and the passport is how that duty is discharged. Both halves matter. Plenty of data is genuinely required by EU law but discharged by a physical label, a technical file held on request, or a database entry — not by publishing it in a passport.
A harmonised standard sits outside that test entirely. Standards are drafted by CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, not by the legislator, and their legal effect is a presumption of conformity: follow the standard and an authority presumes you meet the essential requirement it was written against. That presumption is a shortcut, not a source of obligation. Unless a regulation names the standard and makes it mandatory, you may meet the requirement any other way you can demonstrate.
Four things routinely mistaken for law
Each of these is real, useful, and widely cited in DPP field specifications. None of them, by itself, makes a passport field legally mandatory.
| EN standards | EN 15804+A2 defines the environmental indicators in an EPD. EN 10204 defines mill certificate types. EN 12520 sets furniture durability tests, EN 71 toy safety methods. All four are voluntary technical documents that support a presumption of conformity — they carry a legal obligation only where a regulation makes that specific standard mandatory. |
| Certification schemes | FSC, PEFC, RJC and the EU Ecolabel are voluntary by construction — a producer chooses to be certified, and one who declines is not in breach of anything. The EU Ecolabel is the subtle case: it has a real CELEX number (32010R0066), so a citation to it looks legislative on the page. The regulation establishes a voluntary award scheme. Holding the label imposes duties; not holding it imposes none. |
| Non-EU conventions | The Vienna Convention 1972 on the control and marking of articles of precious metals is a Council of Europe instrument. The EU is not a party to it, so it binds nothing at EU level. It also mandates the wrong artefact: a physical common control mark struck into the metal, not a value published in a passport. |
| Type-approval regulations | UNECE R30 and R54 genuinely bind tyre manufacturers — but the duty is discharged by obtaining type approval and carrying the approval mark, with the supporting values held in the approval dossier. Nothing in either regulation requires publishing those values in a product passport. A real obligation, discharged somewhere other than here. |
What our own audit found, and what we changed
307 fields across our 12 category templates were marked required. 46 rested on non-legislative authority. Nothing was deleted: a field demoted from required is still in the template, still collectable, still exported. It simply no longer claims a law behind it.
Construction — 15 fields
Every one traced to EN 15804+A2, the standard defining EPD indicators. Genuinely the right method for calculating embodied carbon, and worth collecting. Not a legal obligation to publish, so they are now optional with the standard named as the method rather than the mandate.
Steel — 10 fields
Rested on EN 10204 (inspection document types), EN 10025 (structural steel product norms) and ISO 148-1 (Charpy impact test method). Test methods and document formats — the specification a mill certificate follows, not an EU instrument requiring that certificate in a passport.
Tyres — 10 fields
Traced to UNECE R30 and R54, discharged by the approval mark and dossier rather than by publication. Three of the ten cited nothing more than “Product specification” — a description of where the number comes from, standing in a column reserved for legal authority.
Furniture — 5 fields
Split between EN 12520 durability testing and FSC/PEFC chain-of-custody certification. One is a test method, the other a voluntary scheme. Neither is an EU instrument mandating passport content.
Jewelry — 4 fields
Cited the Vienna Convention 1972 — an instrument the EU is not party to, mandating a physical hallmark rather than a passport entry. Two independent reasons the field could not be legally required here, stacked on top of each other.
Toys — 1 field
Traced to EN 71, the harmonised toy safety standard. Conformity with EN 71 supports a presumption against the essential safety requirements; the standard itself compels nothing.
Chemicals — 1 field
Cited “ESPR, SDS Section 7” — a section of a safety data sheet. An SDS is a real document with real duties behind it, but a section number is not a legal instrument, and the data it holds is supplied to recipients rather than published in a passport.
Why over-claiming is the worse error
Both directions of error are real. Mark a field optional when the law requires it and a customer can end up non-compliant; that is the failure everyone in this market designs against, and rightly. But the two errors are not symmetric.
Under-claiming risks non-compliance, and the cost lands on the customer at inspection. Over-claiming wastes a customer's effort chasing data nobody can compel, and it does something worse: it asserts a law that does not exist. Only one of these two errors involves inventing an obligation, and a vendor is uniquely well-placed to be believed when it does.
What changes is what the word “required” is worth. If every field carries an equal-looking asterisk, the ones backed by an actual regulation with an actual deadline get no more attention than the ones backed by a trade body's scheme. Reserving the label for legislation is what makes it informative.
How to check any field yourself
This is not a proprietary method and there is nothing to buy to use it. Take any field marked required, in any passport product including ours, and run it through four questions. If a vendor cannot answer all four for a given field, that is the answer.
- 1
Does the citation name an EU instrument, or just a standard?
Look for a CELEX number — the identifier EUR-Lex assigns to every EU legal act, like 32023R1542 for the Battery Regulation. A standard number (EN 15804+A2, ISO 148-1, UNECE R30) is not one. If the authority column holds only a standard number, a scheme name, or a phrase like “product specification”, no legislation has been cited at all.
- 2
Is that instrument actually in force for this product?
An instrument can be adopted, in force, and still impose nothing on your product yet, because the operative duty waits on a delegated act that has not been adopted. Check the date of application and whether the product group has been brought into scope, rather than reading the parent regulation's existence as a live obligation.
- 3
Is the duty discharged by the passport, or somewhere else?
This catches the most false positives. Data can be genuinely mandatory and still not belong in a passport — because the obligation is met by a physical label or stamped mark, by technical documentation held and produced on request, by an entry in a Commission database such as EPREL or SCIP, or by an importer's declaration. Find the article that says where the information goes.
- 4
For ESPR specifically, has a delegated act landed?
ESPR (EU) 2024/1781 Articles 7 and 9 impose no data fields on their own — they set out what a delegated act may require and how a passport must work. Every actual DPP obligation flows through a product-specific delegated act adopted under Article 4. The only adopted one is battery, under Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 Article 77, mandatory from 18 February 2027. A field justified by “ESPR requires it” with no delegated act behind it is not yet required by anything.
Collect the data anyway — just know which fields the law is behind
Nothing on this page argues for collecting less. EPD indicators, mill certificates, chain-of-custody records and test results are all worth having, and buyers increasingly ask for them regardless of what the law compels. What our audit changed is which fields carry a legal claim: every field still marked required in our templates now cites an EU instrument that is in force and discharged through the passport. You can check any of them with the four questions above.
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