Why Privileged Data Breaks the Circular Economy Promise

"What needs to happen for the Digital Product Passport to be a valuable asset to the industry?"

This was the central question at a recent workshop hosted by Revalu and BLOXHUB, where OpenCirc was invited to present on Digital Product Passports (DPP) developments in the European regulatory context. Our co-presenter, Martha Lewis (Head of Materials at Henning Larsen Architects), examined the Construction Products Regulation(CPR) requirements and the choices the EU has made—and some of the problems those choices create.

For OpenCirc, having held a similar value workshop 18 months earlier, this was a useful checkpoint to see how practitioners are responding as DPP moves from concept to imminent regulatory reality.

What emerged from the discussion wasn't primarily about data requirements or technical specifications—it was about access. Specifically, the EU's decision to restrict chemical substance data to a privileged circle of authorities and manufacturers, while excluding the AECO professionals, certification assessors, and end-of-life processors who need that information to make circular economy decisions.

This isn't just workshop speculation. The EU's recently published feasibility study confirms that privileged access is the intended design. We decided to analyze both the study to understand what this means for circularity—and for the infrastructure work OpenCirc is building.

What we found raises serious questions about whether the DPP will enable the circular economy it promises, or simply digitize existing compliance processes while entrenching information asymmetries that favor incumbent manufacturers.

The privileged access model

The EU feasibility study's access framework is explicit about who can see what. Chemical substance content and hazardous materials information—the data most critical for circular economy decisions—is accessible only to the EU Commission, backup service providers, manufacturers themselves, and market surveillance authorities. AECO professionals, certification scheme assessors, building owners, and end-of-life processors are explicitly excluded from this privileged data layer.

For external parties, the system works through declarations: a simple indication of whether a product is "up-to-code" under current regulation. But as Jan Boström (Head of Sustainability Development at SundaHus) and Martha Lewis articulated sharply during the workshop, an assessment that something is compliant today doesn't affect reusability in the long run. Whether something meets 2025 regulations has little to no value in 2075. With access to actual ingredient substances and CAS numbers, informed judgments can be made at the point of reuse, rather than relying on compliance decisions made decades earlier.

This temporal mismatch is fundamental. Buildings last 50-70 years; construction products often longer through reuse. But the DPP framework treats products as if their informational relevance ends at initial installation and compliance verification. The system is explicitly designed for regulatory enforcement, not material stewardship.

The compliance ceiling problem

Given the nature of certification schemes such as BREEAM, LEED, DGNB and Nordic Swan Ecolabel, the EU proposal for privileged access to chemical data is fundamentally problematic. The principle idea of certification is to go above and beyond minimum requirements on a national and European level. These schemes drive market transformation precisely by rewarding transparency and environmental performance beyond legal baselines.

But with a privilege-based system, AECO actors and certification assessors remain in the dark about whether they can even access the chemical constituents of products. DGNB criteria require documentation of material health and recyclability. BREEAM Mat 01 credits require life cycle impacts including chemical inventory. LEED MR credits demand ingredient transparency. Yet none of these assessors can access the DPP's privileged chemical data.

This creates what we call a "compliance ceiling"—a regulatory minimum that becomes a practical maximum. If designers, consultants, and certification assessors cannot see chemical data, they cannot make informed decisions about exceeding baseline requirements. A product might be legally compliant, but is it DGNB Platinum-worthy? Does it qualify for BREEAM credits for reduced toxicity? Without access to CAS numbers and ingredient lists, these questions become unanswerable. The system designed to enable circular economy effectively caps ambition at legal compliance, making "better" choices technically impossible rather than strategically incentivized.

The feasibility study explicitly acknowledges this separation, stating that "the CPR DPP system is designed to support compliance with regulatory requirements. It is not intended to replace or compete with voluntary sustainability certification schemes." But this framing treats the separation as intentional design rather than a fundamental flaw. In practice, it means manufacturers who want their products specified in certified projects must provide chemical data outside the DPP system entirely—exactly the duplicate disclosure burden the DPP was supposed to eliminate.

The manufacturer gatekeeper model

The compliance ceiling isn't just a technical limitation—it creates an asymmetric market structure by institutionalizing manufacturer control over critical data. The EU's decision to restrict chemical data access doesn't make the EU itself the gatekeeper; rather, it creates a regulatory framework that legally protects manufacturers' ability to selectively disclose data as a strategic asset.

Large manufacturers with administrative capacity can offer privileged access through privately negotiated agreements, using transparency as leverage in commercial relationships. In high-value tenders where environmental credentials matter, they can provide the granular chemical data that the official DPP channel withholds—but only to preferred clients, consultants, or projects that meet their strategic interests.

Meanwhile, smaller manufacturers who might have genuinely better environmental profiles but lack resources for managing complex data-sharing agreements are systematically disadvantaged. AECO actors who want to specify responsibly are forced to maintain special relationships with large producers—not because of product quality, but because of data access. Transparency becomes a luxury afforded through size and influence, rather than a standard baseline for informed decision-making.

The problem compounds with product complexity. Consider a window assembly containing glass, frame materials, seals, gaskets, and coatings—each from different manufacturers. The assembly manufacturer cannot see the complete chemical profile of their own product without negotiating privileged access with all their suppliers. Consultants specifying that window face not one gatekeeper but a cascading network of them, each controlling fragments of the information needed for circular assessment.

The compliance ceiling and the manufacturer gatekeeper model are distinct but reinforcing problems. The ceiling prevents going "above and beyond" regulatory minimums. The gatekeeper structure ensures that even attempting to push that ceiling requires navigating power asymmetries that favor incumbents. Together, they create an ecosystem where the DPP paradoxically inhibits the very circular innovation it was designed to enable.

The incentive against reuse

The privileged access model creates an additional problem for the circular economy that becomes visible at end-of-life. The feasibility study acknowledges that reused products without CE marking may fall outside the DPP system entirely. This creates a perverse choice for materials from deconstruction:

• New product → has DPP → but chemical data is privileged and inaccessible
• Reused product → no CE marking → no DPP → no data whatsoever

For end-of-life decision-making—the core circular economy use case—you're choosing between restricted data you cannot access and no data at all. A building material installed today with a DPP won't be usable for informed reuse decisions in 2075 because:

• The compliance declaration is obsolete (regulations will have changed)
• The chemical data was never accessible to anyone making reuse decisions
• If salvaged and reused, it loses CE marking and its DPP entirely

The administrative burden paradox

The feasibility study repeatedly emphasizes that the DPP system must "not create additional administrative burden" for manufacturers, especially SMEs. Yet the privileged access model creates exactly the duplicative disclosure burden it claims to avoid.

Manufacturers who want their products specified in certified projects must now:

1. Submit DPP data with restricted chemical information (regulatory compliance)
2. Separately provide detailed chemical data to certification scheme assessors (DGNB, BREEAM, LEED)
3. Manage disclosure agreements with consultants and major clients
4. Navigate different disclosure requirements across regions and schemes
5. Coordinate privileged access across nested supply chains for complex assemblies

If chemical data were simply public in the DPP, manufacturers would submit once and that data would be usable everywhere—by certification schemes, consultants, building-level passport systems, and end-of-life processors. The privileged access model doesn't reduce burden; it multiplies it by forcing parallel disclosure pathways for the same information.

This creates a strategic argument that might actually resonate with manufacturers: privileged access creates more work, not less. It protects the ability to use data as leverage, but at the cost of perpetual disclosure negotiations and duplicate submissions. For manufacturers who aren't using transparency strategically—which is most SMEs—it's pure administrative overhead with no commercial benefit.

OpenCirc's strategic response: building for the long term

At OpenCirc, our view is that the political battle over privileged access, while important, isn't where the leverage actually lies. The real opportunity is ensuring that if the access model becomes untenable, the technical infrastructure for transparency already exists.

The feasibility study emphasizes that DPP implementation will build on existing Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) infrastructure, expanding and enriching that data to meet regulatory requirements. This means we're not starting from zero—manufacturers already produce EPDs for many products, and those EPDs contain foundational LCA data including (often aggregated) chemical inventory information. The missing piece isn't data generation; it's the semantic interoperability layer that makes chemical data consistent, comparable, and machine-readable across manufacturers and product categories.

This is where shared data dictionaries, standardized property definitions, and systems like buildingSMART's bSDD become critical infrastructure. The solution isn't just "interoperability" in the abstract—it's ensuring that CAS numbers, chemical constituent data, and hazard classifications use the same machine-readable formats regardless of which manufacturer's DPP you're accessing.

But semantic interoperability alone isn't enough for circularity. The DPP provides a snapshot at market entry—compliance data, initial performance characteristics, manufacturing information. What's missing is the infrastructure for ongoing material stewardship over building lifecycles that span 50-70 years or more.

This is what OpenCirc is building: systems that can capture DPP data at product specification, then continuously enrich it through operations and maintenance. Think of it as a "mason jar" for product data—preserving the initial DPP information while adding layers of operational history, maintenance records, performance data, and contextual information about how products actually behave in real buildings over decades.

When that window assembly needs maintenance in 2045, when that façade panel is considered for reuse in 2065, when building deconstruction happens in 2080—the DPP's compliance declaration from 2025 has little value. But a living data record that combines manufacturer specifications with decades of operational reality becomes the foundation for informed circular decisions.

This approach doesn't wait for the EU to fix privileged access. It works with whatever data manufacturers provide—whether voluntarily disclosed chemical information or just the public DPP layer—and enriches it with building-level intelligence. Over time, products with richer data histories become more valuable in secondary markets, creating market pressure for transparency that bypasses regulatory restrictions.

The mechanism for change

The compliance ceiling creates its own forcing function for change. Certification schemes represent significant market value—DGNB, BREEAM, and LEED certifications drive procurement decisions, rental premiums, and property valuations. If these schemes begin requiring chemical transparency as a prerequisite for credits, they effectively bypass the EU's privileged access model through market pressure rather than regulatory mandate.

A manufacturer who wants their products specified in certified projects would need to provide chemical data voluntarily, regardless of what the DPP system requires or restricts. This is already happening implicitly—manufacturers disclose to certification assessors outside the DPP framework—but semantic interoperability could make it explicit and standardized.

Similarly, building-level Digital Product Passports are being developed as a "complementary layer" to product-level DPPs. If building-level passports require product chemical data for lifecycle assessment and circularity metrics, they create procurement pressure: products without transparent chemical data cannot be included in building passport assessments, making them less attractive for projects with circularity ambitions.

This is the mechanism for change that privileged access inadvertently enables. By making manufacturer gatekeeping visible and commercially costly—rather than technically inevitable—semantic interoperability shifts the dynamics from "can you share?" to "will you share?" And in markets where certification, building passports, and circularity credentials drive value, the commercial answer increasingly becomes "yes, because refusing costs us projects."

By reducing the effort required to exchange and interpret chemical data through standardized formats, we lay the groundwork for a more collaborative industry where transparency isn't a regulatory burden to be avoided, but a baseline for trust and circular innovation.

Building the infrastructure for transparency

The DPP's privileged access model may protect manufacturer control in the short term, but it does so by creating market conditions that make that control strategically untenable over time. Semantic interoperability doesn't just make data sharing easier—it makes data hoarding visible, costly, and ultimately indefensible.

The question the BLOX workshop posed—"What needs to happen for DPP to be valuable?"—has a clear answer: data needs to flow to the people making circular economy decisions, not just at product specification but across entire building lifecycles. The EU's feasibility study designed a system where it doesn't. But the technical infrastructure we're building will make that flow attainable, regardless of how long the regulatory barriers take to fall.

At OpenCirc, we're not waiting for privileged access rules to change. We're building the interoperability layer—standardized templates, open data formats, machine-readable classifications—that makes product data exchange technically trivial. We're building the stewardship systems that capture manufacturer DPPs and enrich them with decades of operational intelligence. We're demonstrating that material passports aren't just compliance documents—they're living records that make Circular Economic decisions possible at every stage of a building's life.

The workshop conversation revealed the problem. The feasibility study confirmed it. And the path forward is clear: build the infrastructure that makes transparency the path of least resistance, and build the stewardship systems that keep product data alive and useful across the 50+ year horizons where circular economy actually happens.

When manufacturers choose transparency—or are compelled to by market forces—the technical and organizational infrastructure will be ready. That's the future OpenCirc is building toward.