Digital Product Passport Guide — Synton AI Docs

Prepare an EU Digital Product Passport for your products, and see exactly how much of the required data you already hold.

What is a Digital Product Passport?

A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a set of structured facts about one product: what it is made of, where it came from, how long it should last, how to repair it, and what should happen to it at the end of its life. Anyone can reach it by scanning a code on the product or its packaging.

It is not a label, a certificate, or a score. It is data you publish and keep accurate, addressed to several different audiences at once: your customer, whoever repairs or recycles the product later, and the authorities who check the market.

What Synton does with it:

Tells you whether a passport is actually required for what you sell, and by when.
Measures how much of a named, dated dataset you already hold, point by point.
Publishes a passport page reachable by a scannable code built on your own product number.
Shows what would block you from the EU registry, before it matters.
Withholds restricted data from public scans, and tells the viewer that it did.

What Synton does not do:

It does not tell you that you are compliant. No software can.
It does not submit anything to the EU registry on your behalf.
It does not guess which kind of battery you sell.

Each of those limits is real, and each is explained below. A limit you discover during an inspection is worse than a limit you read about now.

The one thing to understand first

The EU ecodesign regulation, ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781), has been in force since July 2024. It is a framework. It establishes that passports will exist and how they must work: a persistent unique product identifier, a data carrier on the product, machine-readable data, and no lock-in to one software vendor.

It does not say what a jumper, a chair, or a washing machine must contain.

That comes product group by product group, in a separate delegated act for each one. Until your group's act is adopted, there is no field list you can be measured against, and no date you can miss.

Batteries are the exception, and they do not sit under ESPR at all. They have their own regulation, already adopted, with a real deadline.

Does this apply to you?

Your products	Status today	What to do
Batteries (see the scope test below)	Adopted law. Applies from 18 February 2027	Start collecting now. Most of the data comes from suppliers and takes months
Textiles and footwear	Delegated act not adopted. No date exists in law	Collect the low-regret fields. Nothing is due today
Anything else	No act adopted for your group	Collect the identifiers. Nothing is due today

There is a lot of noise about textile deadlines. Synton will not show you one, because there is no adopted act to take a date from. If another tool shows you a textile deadline, ask which instrument it comes from.

The battery scope test

"Batteries" is one word covering a 60 kWh traction pack and a hearing-aid cell, and the passport rules only reach some of them. Under Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 Art. 77(1) the passport applies to:

Light means of transport (LMT) batteries, meaning e-bikes and scooters. In scope regardless of capacity.
Electric-vehicle batteries. In scope regardless of capacity.
Rechargeable industrial batteries above 2 kWh. Exactly 2 kWh is outside, because the test is "greater than".

Portable batteries (AA cells, coin cells, small device packs) and SLI starter batteries are not covered by the passport. Other parts of the batteries regulation may still apply to them: labelling, collection, recycled content.

Synton does not assume. Passport Readiness asks you which kind of battery this is, and how big it is if it is an industrial one. Until you answer, the verdict reads undetermined and no deadline is shown.

That is deliberate. Showing every battery seller a February 2027 date is the easy, confident, wrong answer, and a false deadline on a regulated matter costs you a supplier programme you did not need. An honest "we need one more fact from you" is cheaper than an urgent number that turns out not to be yours.

Why Synton says coverage, and never compliance

Coverage measures how much of a named dataset you already hold. That is a fact about your data. It can be shown to you point by point, and every point cites the text it comes from.

Compliance is a legal conclusion about whether a product may be placed on the market. It depends on conformity procedures, a technical file, and for some products an assessment body. No software can reach that conclusion for you, and any product that offers you a "compliance score" for a product group whose delegated act does not exist yet has invented the number.

So the word you will see throughout Synton is readiness, and the number you will see is data coverage. This is not hedging. It is the difference between a fact we can prove to you and a verdict nobody is entitled to give you.

Two bands, never one average

Passport Readiness shows two separate bars:

Required by law in force. Asked for by an instrument that applies today. For a battery in scope, this is Annex XIII of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, due 18 February 2027. For everything else, it is the ESPR framework level: the identifier and the carrier.
Expected, not yet law. Anticipated in a future delegated act, modelled from the preparatory work so you can collect it early, but binding on nobody today.

They are never averaged into one number, and there is no setting that combines them.

The reason is simple. If you are at 90% on the expected band and 40% on the band that is law, a blended 65% is a comfortable number that hides the only half that is urgent. Worse, it implies a level of certainty about the unadopted half that does not exist. Two bars are less flattering and more useful.

The three coverage states

Every data point in the dataset lands in one of three states, not two:

State	What it means	Counts against you?
Present	You hold it	It is what raises the bar
Missing	There is somewhere to put it and it is empty	Yes, and you can fix it
Not storable yet	The dataset asks for it and Synton has nowhere to put it	No. Excluded from your bars entirely

That third state is ours, not yours. Counting our own missing columns as your gaps would flatter our product at your expense, so those points are listed separately, under a line saying how many were excluded and why.

It is also a public roadmap. Until 21 August 2026 the battery profile listed four points there: the manufacturing facility identifier, the dismantling and safe-removal information, the supply-chain due-diligence report, and state of health. All four are law in force with a real date, and all four are now storable. The battery dataset currently reports zero not-storable points. If you see the line reappear on a battery passport, it means the dataset moved and we have not caught up, which is exactly what it is there to tell you.

A state-of-health reading only counts when it is dated

State of health is the one battery data point that is not a fact about a model. It is a fact about one physical battery, and it decays over that battery's life.

So Synton scores state of health as present only when the reading carries the date it was taken. A reading with no date scores as missing, even though you typed a number in.

This looks like a quirk. It is a protection, and it protects you in the direction you would not think to check.

A state-of-health figure with no date is a number of unknown age presented as current. The person who reads it is usually a second-life operator or a recycler deciding what your used pack is worth. If they price a pack off a reading taken two years ago, the transaction is wrong, and the wrongness traces back to a passport that you published. Refusing to count an undated reading is the only way to keep that from happening quietly.

Two details worth knowing:

If you enter a date that cannot be read, or a date in the future, Synton clears the date and keeps your number. You do not lose what you typed. The point simply reads as missing, which is the truth about an undated reading.
State of health, state of charge, and the timestamp are treated as one restricted data point. When a public scanner is not entitled to it, all three are withheld together. Serving the charge figure and its timestamp while hiding the health figure would look like a deliberate disclosure rather than a redaction, and half a redaction is worse than none.

Practically: this data comes from a battery management system, not from a spreadsheet. If you score low here, the fix is a telemetry integration, not better record-keeping.

A passport shows different things to different people

ESPR Art. 10 requires the passport to distinguish who may read what, and the battery rules split their dataset across three audiences explicitly. Synton uses one vocabulary for both:

Audience	Typically sees
Public. Anyone who scans the code	Product identity, materials, recycled content, carbon footprint, expected lifetime, hazard information, end-of-life instructions
Legitimate interest. Repairers, remanufacturers, recyclers, second-life operators	Dismantling and safe-removal information, the manufacturing facility identifier, per-unit condition data
Authority. Market-surveillance authorities, customs, notified bodies	Conformity documentation, test reports, the supply-chain due-diligence report

A passport that served every field to every scanner is not a more generous passport. It is a leak of your supply chain, and it does not satisfy either instrument. Your factory list and your technical file are not consumer content.

Two rules are built in and cannot be turned off:

Nobody can promote themselves by asking. Access is granted by an authenticated decision, never by a parameter on the URL. There is no way for a stranger to request the authority view.
Withholding is disclosed, never silent. When the public page holds something back, it says how many points it withheld and which audience they are reserved for. A visitor reading "3 fields are restricted to repairers and recyclers" is seeing the regulation work as intended. The same three fields silently absent looks like a half-finished passport and earns you a support ticket or a complaint.

The code on the product

Your passport is reachable at a GS1 Digital Link built from your GTIN, the barcode number that identifies the product worldwide:

https://app.synton.ai/01/{your-GTIN}

Batch and unit qualifiers work too, /10/{lot} and /21/{serial}, which matters for batteries where the passport is about one physical unit rather than a model. A qualified link narrows, it never widens: if you ask for a specific serial and no passport exists for that unit, you get "no passport for that unit" rather than the model's passport, because those are different answers to different questions.

Why this and not a simple product-page link:

The GTIN belongs to you, not to Synton. If you move to another provider, the same number resolves at their address, and every label you have already printed keeps working. A code built on a vendor's internal id is exactly the lock-in ESPR Art. 11 and Art. 12 exist to prevent.
For batteries, Art. 77(6) is more specific still: the code must lead to a unique, permanent address serving that battery's passport. A QR pointing at your product marketing page does not satisfy it, however nice the page is.
The number forms are interchangeable. A GTIN-8, 12, 13, or 14 is the same number right-aligned in a 14-digit field, so a label carrying the padded GTIN-14 resolves to the EAN-13 you stored.

The EU registry

The Commission runs a central registry for passports, set up under ESPR Art. 13. It is a directory, not a library. It holds your product identifier, the commodity code, a reference to whoever serves the passport, and an integrity digest, then points at where the passport actually lives. Your data stays with you.

Passport Readiness shows what would block registration: a missing or invalid GTIN, an unpublished passport, a missing service-provider reference. Each blocker says what to do about it.

Synton prepares the registration record. It does not submit it. The implementing regulation provides for an API. Until we hold its published interface and a credential path, submitting would mean guessing at a regulator's expectations on your behalf, and telling you "registered" when nothing left the building would be the worst thing this product could do. Use the prepared record to register through your service provider or directly.

One more honest gap: the registration identifier is minted by the Commission. Synton leaves it empty until the registry returns one. A value we generated ourselves would be a forged regulatory reference.

Get started

Open Products from the Launchpad.
Open the Product Passport surface and create a passport for one product. Start with your most regulated or most exported product, not your easiest one.
Add its GTIN. Everything else can follow, but the passport is addressed by this number.
Open Passport Readiness and select that passport.
Answer the battery type question if it appears. Until you do, the verdict stays undetermined and no deadline is shown.
Work down the Required by law in force list first. Every row says what the field means and where merchants normally get it.
Come back to the Expected, not yet law list when the first is done. Nothing there is urgent.
Check the EU registry section for blockers.
Publish the passport, then generate its QR code from the Product Passport surface.

Where the data actually comes from

Most of these fields are not in your system today. They are in your suppliers' systems, and getting them is a procurement conversation, not a data-entry task. The Readiness screen carries this guidance per field; here is the shape of it.

Field	Where merchants usually get it
GTIN	GS1 in your country, if you do not already have one. Never reuse a supplier's
Responsible operator	Your own legal entity, unless you import under someone else's brand
Manufacturer	Your supplier contract. Ask for the legal name and address, not the trading name
Country of manufacture	Your customs paperwork already carries it. It is the same origin you declare on import
Composition	Your supplier's specification sheet. For textiles, start from the care label you already print
Recycled content	Your supplier must state it. Get it evidenced if you intend to claim it publicly
Manufacturing facility	Ask your supplier for the facility identifier. Larger suppliers already hold one for other audits
Carbon footprint	A calculation against the method the rules prescribe. A generic calculator figure is not the same thing
Expected lifetime	Supplier test data. For batteries this is a measured performance parameter, not an estimate
State of health	The battery management system, dated. Not a spreadsheet
Dismantling information	Your engineering or supplier documentation, written for a technician rather than a customer
Substances of concern	Your supplier's declaration. If you already file SCIP notifications, that is the same underlying information
Conformity documents	Your technical file. If you cannot find it, that is worth knowing now rather than during an inspection
Due-diligence report	Your compliance function. The obligation has its own scope thresholds, so check whether it binds you before commissioning work

What to be careful about

A supplier promise is not data. If you have a February 2027 deadline, the supplier conversations start now. Months, not weeks.
A carbon figure from a generic calculator is not a declared footprint. Where the rules prescribe a calculation method, that method is part of the requirement.
Do not reuse a supplier's GTIN. The passport is addressed by that number. A borrowed one points at somebody else's product, and every label you print inherits the mistake.
Presence is scored, adequacy is not. Synton can see that you hold a due-diligence report. Whether it is a good one is a conformity judgement, and not ours to make.
A restricted field is not a missing field. If a public scan hides something, that is the access rules working. Check the readiness screen, which shows you everything you hold.
Nothing here is legal advice. Synton measures your data against published texts and cites them. Whether you may sell a product is a decision for you and your advisors.

Common questions

Do I need a passport right now? Only if you sell LMT, electric-vehicle, or above-2 kWh rechargeable industrial batteries, and then from 18 February 2027. For everything else, no delegated act has been adopted, so there is no dataset and no date.

When are textiles due? There is no answer to give. The delegated act has not been adopted, so the field list, the granularity, the access-rights model, and the transition period are all still undetermined. Collect the low-regret fields (fibre composition, country of manufacture, care instructions) because you largely hold them already for other rules.

Why does my score not go up when I fill a field? Three common reasons: the field belongs to the other band, so a different bar moved; the value failed validation, for example a GTIN whose check digit does not match; or it is a state-of-health reading with no date, which does not count until it is dated.

Can I see one combined percentage? No, and this is not a missing feature. See "Two bands, never one average" above.

What happens to my passports if I leave Synton? Your GTIN is yours. The passport address is built from it, so it resolves at your next provider and printed labels keep working. Export the passport data before you go.

Related guides

Understanding Modules for how surfaces and apps fit together
AI Chat Guide for asking questions about your catalog data
FAQ for general questions
Support if something here does not match what you see