実現手段から門番へ：デジタル製品パスポートと循環貿易ガバナンスの盲点

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:貿易法と循環経済ガバナンスの交差点における「分類上の盲点」という新たな分析枠組みを提供する。

🏢実務担当者:EU向け輸出企業は、DPP対応が契約を通じて上流サプライヤーへ波及することを前提に、調達契約・データ管理体制を再設計すべき。

🏛政策担当者:DPPの域外適用がTBT協定の規律をすり抜ける可能性を認識し、第三国・中小事業者への影響評価と設計上の配慮を検討すべき。

When the WTO Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade met in July 2026, its agenda included a cluster of concerns raised by members about digital product passports: the scope of the requirements, the time available to comply, and the recognition of equivalent regulations and of conformity assessment carried out abroad (WTO, 2026a;WTO, 2026b). An instrument conceived as an enabler of circular trade had, before its principal rules were even in force, become the object of formal trade concerns. That juxtaposition is the starting point of this article.The passport is the centrepiece of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the framework instrument of the EU's circular economy agenda, which replaced the earlier Ecodesign Directive and extended its logic from energy-related products to almost all goods placed on the Union market (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781). It will carry the material and lifecycle data on which reuse, repair and recycling decisions depend, and textiles are the first sector in line. The first content specification for textile apparel, issued by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in May 2026, sets out 49 data points to be reported at the level of the production batch, ahead of a delegated act expected around 2027 (González-Torres and Arcipowska, 2026); the revised Waste Framework Directive, in force since October 2025, has meanwhile placed extended producer responsibility for textiles on the same trajectory (Directive (EU) 2025/1892). Because the obligation attaches to placing a product on the Union market, it reaches every supplier that sells into the Union, wherever located -a reach that commentators have already read as a textbook instance of the "Brussels effect," the EU's capacity to set de facto global standards through market access rather than negotiation (Bradford, 2020), though the reach of that effect is itself contested, since on some accounts the stringency of EU rules makes it a preference outlier with limited pull over international standards (Young, 2015).The circular economy seeks to decouple growth from resource use by closing material loops, and international trade determines whether those loops can close across borders or remain confined within them (Bato and Kašťáková, 2025). Reliable information about what a product contains is a genuine precondition for circularity: in textiles, a sector whose globalised structure has steadily eroded supply-chain transparency, traceability is widely identified as a prerequisite for any credible circular transition (Das et al., 2025). The case for the passport, in these terms, is strong. Yet the scholarship on passports has developed largely along technical and managerial lines, data architecture, adoption barriers, standardisation, while giving comparatively little attention to their legal and institutional consequences, and in particular to how they intersect with the rules of international trade and whether their design might entrench asymmetries among the actors caught up in them (Yuan, 2025). Where the external effects of the ESPR have been examined, the analysis has tended to remain either at the level of general trade-law compatibility, such as the treatment of "like products" and eco-labelling under WTO rules (Blot, 2025), or at the level of firm-level readiness (Farrukh and Sajjad, 2024). The mechanism connecting the two, how a market-access condition is actually transmitted to the producers who must satisfy it, has not been articulated.Addressing that omission is the contribution of this article, and the registers on which it draws are worth separating at the outset. That the passport obligation attaches to the placing of a product on the Union market, and falls on the economic operator who does so, follows from Regulation (EU) 2024/1781. That the textile specification is at this stage a technical recommendation rather than a binding requirement is likewise a matter of record. That comparable data obligations have in practice travelled downstream to suppliers is an empirical observation drawn from adjacent regimes (Sela et al., 2025). What is advanced here as original is the connection between them: that a public obligation of this kind is transmitted along the value chain as a private contractual condition, and that this transmission falls into a blind spot in trade law. By blind spot is meant a categorisation gap. Exclusion operates through purchase orders, onboarding conditions and audit criteria, instruments attributable to no Member and answering to none of the definitions on which the disciplines of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade operate. The argument is not that the passport is unlawful, nor that a legal vacuum exists.The article develops this claim in three steps: it characterises the passport as a market-access condition, traces the contractual cascade through which that condition is transmitted, and locates the categorisation gap this creates, before turning to the design choices through which a passport might enable circularity without excluding the producers on whom it depends. In doing so it extends a broader argument that trade policy, reformed with intent, can turn from a barrier into an enabler of circular value chains (Bato and Kašťáková, 2025).The digital product passport as a condition of market accessIn its own terms the passport is an enabler of circularity: the data carrier attached to the product is to make material composition and lifecycle attributes legible to the recyclers, repairers, regulators and consumers who handle it after the point of sale (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781). There is little reason to doubt that this is its purpose.Its legal form, however, is that of a market-access condition. The obligation attaches to the placing of a product on the Union market, so that a product without a compliant passport may not lawfully be sold, and it applies irrespective of where the product was made (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781). This is a shift in kind rather than degree. Traceability requirements have historically operated as post-market obligations, verified through surveillance once goods are already in circulation; the passport moves verification upstream, into a pre-market digital condition that must be satisfied before access is granted. For the large majority of textiles consumed in the Union that are imported, the condition falls in the first instance on producers established outside it.The Commission does not treat this consequence as incidental. It has acknowledged that the requirements will have significant implications for trading partners particularly developing ones (European Commission, 2025), since all goods placed on the Union market, imports included, must comply, and it has committed to assessing the effects on third countries and to attending to the needs of smaller operators in the design of specific requirements. These are meaningful commitments, and the argument that follows does not assume their absence.It is therefore worth stating plainly what is, and what is not, contested here. The legitimacy of the environmental objective is not in question, nor is the proposition that circularity depends on reliable product information: a passport that no one can populate serves no one. What is at issue is narrower and concerns the instrument's design, the granularity of what must be reported, the sequence in which obligations take effect, and the distribution of the resulting cost across a value chain whose upstream participants had no part in setting the requirement. It is to that mechanism of distribution that the article now turns.The ESPR allocates the digital product passport obligation to the economic operator placing a product on the Union market -the manufacturer, the importer, or an authorised representative established in the EU (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781). The allocation is unambiguous, and in formal terms it falls entirely within the Union's regulatory jurisdiction. The information the passport must carry, however, does not originate there. This is a different problem from the one posed by overlapping traceability regimes across jurisdictions, where the difficulty lies in legal conflict between systems of broadly comparable regulatory capacity (Huang and Nottage, 2026); here the transmission occurs within a single value chain, between parties of markedly unequal capacity. Figure 1 sets out the cascade and the point at which it crosses out of the reach of the trade disciplines.The first complete content specification for textile apparel, published by the JRC as a recommendation that the delegated act may yet revise, sets out 49 data points across four categories: product identification, producer identification, product information, and compliance documentation (González-Torres and Arcipowska, 2026). Several can be supplied by the brand or importer. Most cannot. Fibre composition, recycled content and the recycling route by which it was obtained, substances of concern reported by name and concentration, facility-level identifiers, and carbon and environmental footprint data are all generated two or three tiers upstream -in spinning, dyeing and finishing operations, and among chemical input suppliers with which the EU operator typically holds no contractual relationship whatsoever. The minimum granularity the specification envisages is the production batch rather than the model, which (if carried into the act) pushes the reporting requirement further into the manufacturing process rather than allowing it to be satisfied at the point of design.This creates a structural gap between where the obligation is placed and where the compliance capability resides. The gap is bridged not by regulation but by contract -and the recent architecture of EU value-chain law takes that bridging for granted. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive requires the in-scope company to obtain contractual assurances of compliance from its business partners, and to seek correspo

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1952264first seen 2026-09-11 05:08:46