Digital Product Passport — the page behind the QR
What the QR on a serialised unit resolves to, how to fill in the passport data, what customers can and cannot see, and the difference between DPP-ready and DPP-compliant.
Section 01
What the passport is
2 minutes
A Digital Product Passport is a public web page for one physical unit. Not a product — a unit. Serial SN-2026-0117 has its own passport, and the bracket next to it on the shelf has a different one.
The passport is reached by scanning the QR label on the unit. No login, no account, no app — a phone camera is enough. That is the point: the people who need it most are the ones who have no relationship with your systems, such as a customer six years after purchase, or a recycler at end of life.
New to this? When to use lots, and when to use serial numbers — a passport needs a serial, not a lot.
One QR serves two very different readers. Brytebuild decides which to give by what the scanner asks for:
A label is printed once and lives on the product for years. If people and machines needed different QR codes you would have to guess, at printing time, who would eventually scan it. One address that answers both keeps the label correct for the life of the unit.
Section 02
What a customer actually sees
2 minutes
The passport page is deliberately short. It answers the questions someone holding the product actually has, and nothing else.
ACME ENGINEERING LTD
Steel Mounting Bracket
SN-2026-0117
In warranty — covered until 4 March 2029
Product History — made 4 Mar 2026 · inspected 6 Mar 2026 · despatched 11 Mar 2026
The page is built from a strict allowlist, not from your product record with a few fields hidden. That distinction matters: a field can only ever appear in public if someone deliberately added it to the public list.
- Shown: serial number, product name, your company name as manufacturer, warranty start and end, whether it is currently in warranty, origin, materials, recycled content, repairability and spare-parts availability, recycling and disassembly guidance, and a date-only lifecycle history.
- Never shown: any cost or price, lot internals, the customer's name or address, staff or supplier names, and internal document references. History entries are relabelled and reduced to dates.
The passport names you as manufacturer — that is branding, and it is the point of a passport that proves authenticity. It never names your customer.
Section 03
Filling in the passport data
3 minutes
Passport data is held per product, not per unit, and every unit of that product inherits it. You enter it once on the item record.
The item’s own Sustainability tab displays this data but cannot change it — it is headed read-only. Fill it in from Edit on the item, where the same tab is editable.
| Field | What to put in it |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | Where the unit was manufactured. Shown on the passport as "Origin". |
| Materials | One row per material: name, percentage by weight, and recycled percentage. Entered as rows, so it stays machine-readable rather than a sentence. |
| Recycled content % | The headline figure for the whole unit. Shown prominently, so do not guess it. |
| Recycling instructions | What a waste handler should do with it. This is the field most likely to be read by someone who has never heard of you. |
| Disassembly instructions | How to take it apart safely — the practical companion to the recycling note. |
| Repairability note | Plain text on whether and how it can be repaired. |
| Spare parts available | A yes/no switch. Shown to the customer as a repairability line. |
| Carbon footprint | Optional, in kg. Only fill it in if you have a figure you could defend — an invented number here is worse than a blank. |
The passport record also carries substances of concern and certifications, which the standards expect. Neither has a field in the app today, so both stay empty — worth knowing if you are checking your own coverage against a product-group requirement.
You fill the Sustainability tab on the steel bracket once: origin United Kingdom, materials Steel 94% / Zinc 6%, recycled content 62%, spare parts available. Every bracket you have ever serialised now carries that passport — including SN-2026-0117, which shipped to Acme in March. You did not touch a single unit record.
That inheritance is the feature and the trap. It is why filling the tab is a five-minute job rather than a per-unit chore — and it is also why the next warning matters.
There is one set of passport data per product, with no version history. If you correct the recycled-content figure today, the passport of every unit you have already shipped changes too — including units sold years ago under the old figure. Treat an edit as a statement about your whole back catalogue, and keep your own record of what changed and when.
Section 04
The QR, and the link inside it
2 minutes
Open any serial unit and you get a Public Passport Label — a printable card carrying the QR, the product name, the readable serial number and the warranty end date. Print it, stick it on the unit or its nameplate, and the passport is now attached to the physical thing.
The QR does not contain a website address you chose, and it is not a random short link. It encodes a standards-based product identifier that happens to also be a working URL. Which of the two forms you get depends on one thing: whether the product has a GTIN (the barcode number behind an EAN).
If the product has a GTIN
https://api.brytebuild.co.uk/dpp/01/05012345678900/21/SN-2026-0117A GS1 Digital Link. 01 introduces the GTIN and 21 introduces the serial — the same numbers used across GS1 barcodes worldwide, so a scanner that has never heard of Brytebuild can still parse it.
If it has no GTIN
https://api.brytebuild.co.uk/dpp/{company}/{product}/SN-2026-0117A self-issued link under our own domain, following IEC 61406. It needs no GS1 registration and no membership fee, which matters if you make parts that were never intended to carry a retail barcode.
Both forms are legitimate product identifiers. You do not choose between them in a setting — put an EAN on the product and you get the GS1 form, leave it blank and you get the self-issued one.
The link is built when the label is generated. If you print labels, then add a GTIN to the product later, the labels already stuck on units still carry the self-issued link. Those keep working — but the two batches are no longer identified the same way. If a GTIN is coming, add it first.
Section 05
Where this leaves you legally
2 minutes
Digital Product Passports exist because of EU law — the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean for you, because the marketing around this topic is unusually loose.
- The regulation asks for properties, not products. It requires a data carrier, a unique identifier, and machine-readable data in open standards. It does not name QR codes, GS1 or JSON-LD. Those are the conventions the industry has settled on, and they are what Brytebuild implements.
- It applies per product group, on a timetable. Obligations arrive group by group through separate delegated acts rather than all at once, and it binds goods placed on the EU or Northern Ireland market. There is no Great Britain equivalent.
- Software cannot be compliant on your behalf. Compliance attaches to a product placed on the market by a company — never to a tool. Any vendor selling you a "DPP-compliant" system is describing something that cannot exist.
Brytebuild is DPP-ready: the carrier, the identifier and the structured open-standard data are all in place, so when your product group is covered you are building on the right foundations rather than starting over. We do not claim, and you should not repeat, that using Brytebuild makes a product DPP-compliant.
Whether any of this applies to what you make, and by when, depends on your product group and your markets. Check your own obligations with someone qualified to advise on them — do not infer them from this page.