The EU has set ambitious rules for product data. Now a new Horizon Europe project is building the infrastructure to meet them — without drowning companies in paperwork; enabling them to focus on what matters: building better products, greener supply chains, and stronger businesses.
For European manufacturers, Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are arriving quickly — and with them, a wave of new regulatory requirements. Yet behind the compliance burden lies a strategic opportunity: companies that manage product data effectively can increase transparency, access new markets, and build more resilient, circular value chains. COMPLIANCE4DPP, a newly launched Horizon Europe funded project, is designed to help industry seize that opportunity. By automating compliance verification and embedding it directly into existing European data space infrastructure, the project transforms DPPs from an administrative obligation into a driver of competitiveness and innovation.
COMPLIANCE4DPP: Making Digital Product Passports work in practice
COMPLIANCE4DPP (Horizon Europe Grant Agreement No. 101298718), which launched on 1 June 2026, is a newly funded EU research and innovation project focused on one of the defining industrial challenges of the coming decade: making automated compliance for Digital Product Passports (DPPs) operational across real-world European value chains. Coordinated by EIT Manufacturing East GmbH, the project brings together a consortium of 19 partners from nine countries, combining expertise in Gaia-X data spaces, industrial data ecosystems, regulatory compliance, open-source tooling, circular manufacturing, and SME engagement.
The challenge: From regulation to real-world value
As Europe accelerates its transition to a circular economy, Digital Product Passports — digital records carrying essential information about a product’s origin, composition, environmental impact, repairability, and recycling potential — are emerging as a cornerstone technology. The EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan, due to be adopted in 2026, sets a target of doubling material recycling and reuse rates by 2030, and DPPs are central to achieving this goal across sectors from electronics and automotive to textiles and construction.
Yet the full promise of DPPs remains unrealised. Many companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), currently perceive DPPs as a regulatory burden rather than an opportunity. The validation of compliance across actors and transactions in distributed data ecosystems remains technically complex, and the lack of interoperability and mutual trust between data systems continues to fragment value chains. Without the right infrastructure, DPPs risk becoming costly, siloed obligations rather than shared assets.
The solution: Compliance by design, powered by Gaia-X
COMPLIANCE4DPP addresses these challenges directly. The project leverages Gaia-X architectural frameworks and proven data space practices to ensure transparency, openness, reliability, security, and interoperability in data exchange — embedding automated compliance verification (‘Compliance Definition as Code’) directly into the infrastructure that industrial data ecosystems already rely on.
Central to the project is the Pontus-X ecosystem, a Gaia-X Lighthouse Data Space and the largest publicly available Gaia-X implementation. COMPLIANCE4DPP will advance Pontus-X specifically for DPP integration, strengthening its technical architecture, governance model, identity and credential management, smart contracting, and user policies, while adding automated compliance mechanisms that ensure data transactions fully satisfy applicable EU regulatory frameworks — including the GDPR, the AI Act, the Data Governance Act, and the Data Act.
A dedicated DPP framework will also be developed to support rapid onboarding of SMEs, lowering the technical and administrative barriers that currently prevent smaller companies from participating fully in European data spaces. Crucially, the compliance tooling will be released as free-to-use, open-source components — ensuring that the benefits of the project extend far beyond its consortium.
“Everyone talks about data spaces, Digital Product Passports and trusted data sharing. The real challenge is making them work in practice. Gaia-X has created an important foundation by establishing common principles for trust, transparency and interoperability. The next step is helping organisations put these principles into operation across real-world value chains. That is where COMPLIANCE4DPP comes in.” — Johannes Hunschofsky, Managing Director, EIT Manufacturing East GmbH (Project Coordinator)
Two use cases, broad applicability
The project’s approach will be validated through two concrete industrial use cases, providing bestpractice blueprints for DPP-enabled data sharing that other sectors can adopt. These scenarios demonstrate not only regulatory compliance but also how automated, trustworthy data exchange can support sustainable and circular production strategies — comparing real-world input data on environmental, social, and economic dimensions against targeted circular models. The project targets Technology Readiness Level 8 (TRL8) for its core open-source components, meaning they will be mature enough for deployment in production environments.
“Gaia-X creates interoperability by making trust, compliance and governance portable & comparable across ecosystems, which is exactly what we bring to the table in the COMPLIANCE4DPP project. We enable Digital Product Passports to become practical at scale through the Gaia-X Trust Framework and Trust Protocol— supporting the industry, reducing complexity for SMEs, and turning trust into an asset for innovation across sovereign European data spaces.” — Roland Fadrany, COO, Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL
“As Chair at the SME and Entrepreneurship Committee at Business at OECD, I know how important it is to deliver digital solutions that strengthen the competitiveness of European SMEs. These solutions must be user-friendly, transparent, efficient, and automatically aligned with EU legislation in this age of AI and big data. This is the goal of COMPLIANCE4DPP.” — Martina Le Gall Malaková, President, INDUSTRY INNOVATION CLUSTER; Chair, SME and Entrepreneurship Committee, Business at OECD
A strategic investment in European competitiveness
The project’s objectives are closely aligned with Europe’s broader ambitions. The EU manufacturing sector employs approximately 30 million people and faces mounting pressure to become more resilient, sustainable, and digitally capable. Manufacturing firms typically spend 40% of their budgets on materials, making circular production processes and better access to material data a direct lever for profitability. At the same time, the proliferation of EU digital and sustainability legislation creates significant compliance costs — particularly for SMEs. COMPLIANCE4DPP directly addresses this challenge by turning compliance from a cost centre into a shared, reusable capability that strengthens competitiveness and accelerates the green transition.
About COMPLIANCE4DPP
COMPLIANCE4DPP supports the green and digital transition in European manufacturing by delivering automated compliance tooling for Digital Product Passports within Gaia-X data spaces. Building on the Pontus-X Lighthouse Data Space, the project develops open-source ‘Compliance Definition as Code’ components that make trustworthy, interoperable data exchange accessible to organisations of all sizes — including SMEs. Two concrete industrial use cases validate the approach at TRL8, establishing replicable blueprints for the wider industry. The project is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, Grant Agreement No. 101298718, and is coordinated by EIT Manufacturing East GmbH.
Follow COMPLIANCE4DPP on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/compliance4dpp
Media Contact
Dominique Garcia Marschall
Strategic Projects Manager, EIT Manufacturing East GmbH
dominique.garciamarschall@manufacturing.eu
COMPLIANCE4DPP has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101298718. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
