DPP for Plastic Raw Materials and Polymers

For a polymer or compound producer the Digital Product Passport question is asked the other way round: not "when is my passport due?" but "what will my customer's passport ask of me?" The hardest field in packaging, appliance and automotive-part passports is proof of recycled content, and that proof is produced together with the pellet batch or not at all.

Polymers are in scope of ESPR but do not appear as an intermediate group in the 2025–2030 working plan. The pull comes from PPWR's plastic packaging targets and from customer passports.

The polymer as intermediate: where does the passport attach?

A pellet is not a final product; it becomes packaging film, a refrigerator housing or a car bumper. The final product's passport references the polymer batch in its "material composition" and "recycled content" fields. For that reference to work, the polymer producer's batch record must match the material line in the customer's bill of materials. See preparing the bill of materials (BOM) and choosing granularity.

In practice this means sending a machine-readable batch declaration with every shipment: structured data, not a PDF certificate.

Recycled content: method, allocation, certificate

The recycled share depends on three questions:

1. Method: mechanical recycling (washing, grinding, extrusion) and chemical recycling (pyrolysis, depolymerisation) produce different evidence chains.
2. Allocation: in chemical recycling the recycled feedstock is mixed with fossil feedstock, so the share is calculated by mass balance. Which allocation rule will be accepted is still debated at EU level; the calculation and verification rules under PPWR are pending.
3. Certificate: EuCertPlast (recycler), RecyClass (recycled content and traceability) and ISCC PLUS (mass balance) are the third-party evidence for the declaration.

The passport should hold not just the percentage but the method and the certificate number. See how to prove recycled content.

The legislation creating the demand

For the packaging side, see DPP and PPWR for packaging and PPWR-compliant packaging labelling; for electronics, recycled content in electronics.

Data points of the batch passport

• Identity: polymer type (PE, PP, PET, PA and the like), grade, batch number, production date and plant.
• Recycled content: share, method (mechanical / chemical), allocation rule, certificate name and number, source stream (post-consumer / post-industrial).
• Chemical: additives, SVHC declaration, restricted substances, food-contact compliance declaration.
• Environmental: carbon footprint per batch or grade and the calculation method. See how to calculate a product carbon footprint.
• Processing: melt flow index, density, recommended processing temperature; matches the customer's quality record.

Most of these fields exist today in the technical data sheet and the certificate; what is missing is that they are per batch and machine-readable. See DPP for chemicals, REACH and SCIP.

Preparation for Turkish polymer producers

1. Fix the batch number as the single identifier; tie shipment, certificate and test report to it.
2. Write the method and allocation rule for recycled content into the product record; schedule certificate renewals.
3. Calculate the carbon footprint per grade; request primary data from suppliers.
4. Define a batch declaration format that matches the customer's bill of materials and send it with the shipment.
5. Align the data model with the field names of customer passports. See the data model guide.

Frequently asked questions