Transcript

Good morning, and welcome to the yellow3 Monday Morning Briefing for 7 September 2026.

The main Digital Product Passport story this week is not another deadline.

It is the infrastructure now starting to form around it.

First, to Brussels.

The European Commission’s current roadmap points to September for the decision covering the final two horizontal Digital Product Passport standards.

Six standards have already been cited.

The remaining areas include access rights, information security, confidentiality, and the authentication and reliability of passport data.

That is important because the technical framework is getting much closer to completion.

But there is one distinction worth making.

September is a standards milestone.

It is not a new compliance deadline for another product category.

Now to implementation.

On 3 September, the OPC Foundation presented an open-source reference implementation showing how a Digital Product Passport can be generated directly from industrial production data.

In the example, a product is tracked through manufacturing by serial number.

Data from the production process can then be used to calculate product-specific information, including carbon footprint, collect relevant quality information, and generate the passport itself.

That is a significant development.

Because it points to a very different future from the one many companies are still preparing for.

The Digital Product Passport may not become another system where somebody manually enters information after a product is made.

Instead, it can increasingly become an output of the production process itself.

The OPC Foundation is clear that this is still a reference implementation, not a finished compliance product.

But the direction matters.

And there is another important development today.

From 7 to 9 September, the new ISO and IEC Joint Technical Committee for the Digital Product Passport is holding its first meeting in Berlin.

Thirty-two countries are participating, with another sixteen observing.

The objective is international interoperability.

And that takes the Digital Product Passport discussion beyond Europe.

Last week, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific also brought Digital Product Passports into a wider discussion on cross-border trade, alongside international standards organisations, digital trade infrastructure and global logistics.

Taken together, the signal is becoming clearer.

The Digital Product Passport is starting to move beyond being treated simply as a European sustainability compliance requirement.

It is becoming part of a much larger technical infrastructure connecting products, factories, supply chains, regulators and international trade.

And for businesses, that changes the question.

It is becoming less about:

Which Digital Product Passport platform should we buy?

And much more about:

Can we produce trusted product information at the source, maintain the evidence behind it, and move that information reliably across systems?

That is where the real implementation challenge is starting to appear.

We will keep watching the evidence.

This is yellow3.