Digital Product Passports for Construction

Construction is where the product passport idea is oldest and the regulatory instrument is newest. Material passports have circulated in the sector for years as a voluntary practice; Regulation (EU) 2024/3110, the recast Construction Products Regulation, gives them a legal basis.

The sector also has a constraint no other product group shares to the same degree. A jacket lasts five years and a laptop three. A structural element lasts fifty, and the person who needs its data has not been born yet.

How it relates to the declaration of performance

Construction products already carry a declaration of performance stating how the product performs against essential characteristics under a harmonised technical specification. That instrument does not disappear.

The passport sits alongside it, carrying information the declaration does not: environmental impact, reuse potential, hazardous content and the detail a future refurbishment or demolition team needs. The two answer different questions — one is about whether the product performs, the other about what it is and what happens to it afterwards.

Why longevity changes the architecture

Most passport design assumes the issuing company persists. In construction that assumption is unsafe over the relevant horizon. Manufacturers merge, are acquired, and fail; product ranges are discontinued; the specific plant that made a batch closes.

A passport reachable only through a manufacturer’s own web infrastructure is therefore likely to be unreachable exactly when it is needed, which is during a refurbishment thirty years later.

The practical answers are open standards for identity and content, a resolver independent of the corporate website, and duplication of the data into the building’s own as-built record so that it survives independently of any external service.

The attributes that matter at end of life

Construction end-of-life decisions turn on three things, and each is a passport attribute that is difficult to reconstruct after installation.

• Reuse potential. Whether the element can be removed intact, how it was fixed, and what condition assessment is needed before reuse. Removability is determined by the fixing method chosen at design.
• Hazardous content and its location. Not merely whether a substance is present but which component contains it, so refurbishment does not release it unknowingly.
• Material composition by mass. What the element is actually made of, at a level of detail that lets a recycler decide whether recovery is economic.

The second of those is the one with immediate safety consequences. A refurbishment team cutting into a panel needs to know what is in it before the cut, and a passport that says only that the product complies with restrictions does not answer the question.

Environmental product declarations expire

Construction has a mature environmental declaration practice through EN 15804, and those declarations carry validity periods, typically five years.

That creates a maintenance obligation most passport programmes are not designed for. A passport referencing an expired declaration is stating something that is no longer supported, and because building products stay specified for years, the expiry will often occur while the product is still being sold.

The operational implication is that expiry dates need to be tracked as data rather than remembered, with the passport surfacing the status rather than silently continuing to present a stale reference.

Where this connects to building-level records

A product passport describes a product. A building needs to know which products are where, which is a different record maintained by a different party.

The connection between them is the identifier, which is why identifier stability matters more here than almost anywhere else. If the product identifier changes, the building record’s reference to it breaks, and nobody discovers that until somebody tries to use it.