Bridging Theory and Practice: Requirements for the Digital Product Passport Implementation in Practice

Implementing Digital Product Passports (DPPs) is essential for enhancing data transparency and reliability, fostering a circular economy, and supporting more sustainable production and consumption patterns. However, the specific practical requirements for successfully implementing DPPs remain unclear across technological, organizational, and environmental contexts. This knowledge gap poses a challenge, as DPP obligations are progressively introduced for individual product groups within ambitious transition timelines. To address this issue, this study empirically investigates the practical requirements for DPP implementations and bridges the gap between emerging academic concepts and real-world implementation needs. Through semi-structured interviews with nine experts, a systematic literature review (SLR), and secondary data analysis, we inductively identified 76 requirements across 11 categories and structured them along the technology, organization, and environment dimensions of the TOE framework. We then compared these requirements against the current regulatory and standardization framework, including the harmonized EN 182xx standards and the implementing regulation on the DPP registry. Our findings indicate that 26 requirements are covered, 19 are partially covered, and 31 remain open. The results underscore the importance of long-term data availability, fine-grained access management, and the alignment of industrial prototypes with the harmonized technical standards, thereby offering guidance for both academia and industry. Ultimately, this study advances sustainable practices in industry by facilitating the adoption of DPPs as a key enabling instrument for the circular economy and by providing an empirically grounded requirements framework to guide the design of scalable, interoperable DPP ecosystems.