The EU's Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirement is moving from regulatory text to technical reality. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), products sold in the EU must carry a DPP—a machine-readable identifier linking to standardized lifecycle data. For developers and compliance teams, 2026 marks the year where pilot programs transition to real deployments. Here's what matters technically. What a DPP Actually Is A DPP is not a document—it's a data structure. The European Commission's framework defines it as: A unique product identifier (DataMatrix or QR code following GS1 standards) A data carrier that links physical product to digital record A dataset covering materials, energy use, repairability, end-of-life instructions An access control layer defining who can read or write which data fields The underlying data model follows the EU's data space architecture (FIWARE/NGSI-LD or equivalent).…