The ever-growing volumes of e-commerce trade from outside the EU directly to consumers is an increasing challenge globally for customs and market surveillance authorities. In 2024, “4.6 billion of such low value consignments [up to EUR 150] were imported in the EU, almost twice the number recorded in 2023 (2.4 billion), and more than tripled since 2022 (1.4 billion)” (COM, 2025a, p.2). This steep increase in volumes makes it very hard for authorities to monitor and control these flows. However, difficulties to efficiently and effectively manage compliance of these flows, is arguably resulting in unsafe or unsustainable products entering the EU market or unfair competition as products that do not comply to stringent EU requirements are able to enter the market. For example, a recent investigation carried out by 27 customs authorities and 108 market surveillance authorities as part of a EU-wide large-scale operation1 where around 20 000 pieces of toys and small electronics were checked, indicate that many of the products checked had issues with following EU product standards. Having in mind the growing volumes of e-commerce flows, there is an urgent need for authorities to get a better grip to address the cross-border e-commerce compliance monitoring challenges.

Legislative changes that concern both customs and market surveillance authorities are under way. Concerning customs, the ambitious EU Customs Reform was approved on 26 March 2026 by EU Member States and the European Parliament (EU, 2026). The three pillars to the Customs Reform are (1) Smart data-driven approach to customs checks, which will include the establishment of an EU Customs Authority and an EU Customs Data Hub, (2) a strong partnership with businesses, and (3) a modern approach to e-commerce. At the same time, new legislative changes under the Product Act will also affect the way of working of the EU market surveillance authorities. Addressing the issue of authorities in monitoring the steep increase of cross-border e-commerce flows needs to be seen in view of these recent developments.

In the meantime, in 2025, the European Commission published a communication on A Comprehensive EU Toolbox for Safe and Sustainable E-commerce (COM, 2025a), where digital tools, including Digital Product Passports are seen as a potential part of the solution. In the European Union, Digital Product Passports (DPP) were initially seen only as an instrument to foster ecodesign and circularity and to improve market surveillance. The latter has acquired new importance also to solve e-commerce compliance challenges and the DPP concept is increasingly also seen as a tool to address wider concerns including administrative burden reduction. The upcoming EU Product Act (Q3 2026) of the is anticipated to further strengthen this role of DPPs. The Digital Product Passports are still under development and while they are considered as an element for the solution to address cross-border e-commerce monitoring challenges, what role they can play in this context needs to be further understood....

Cross-border e-commerce is continuously growing with rapid speed which poses issues for authorities to monitor and control the large volumes of goods entering the EU via postal and express services. Digital Product Passports (DPP) are seen as a digital tool that can enable the e-commerce monitoring, however what roles DPPs can play is not yet fully understood. In this research, based on real-life piloting with scanned x-ray images of 10 packages with textiles and toys and based on product data, we gained insights and defined further research directions for exploring further the potential of DPPs and AI and scanned images for customs risk management in the context of cross-border e-commerce.

The European Union has put forward an ambitious EU Green Deal with the goal to advance the green and circular transition in the EU. Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are introduced in several legislations as a powerful new tool that can enable product data sharing with downstream value chains partners, like re-manufacturers and recyclers, as well as with consumers and authorities, to enable the transition towards more circular practices. These DPPs are intended not only to pose limited additional administrative burden but also act as a mechanism to allow for generating business benefits, to incentivize companies into changing their business processes towards more circularity. At the same time, the European Commission’s recent focus on EU competitiveness has highlighted the role DPPs are foreseen to play as an instrument to reduce the administrative reporting burden as well. Whether and how DPP may play a role in reducing the administrative burden is the focus of this research. To this end, a stakeholder consultation was conducted where representatives from different industries, technology providers, NGOs and academia were invited to express their ideas on the topic. Subsequently 10 high-level areas of potential for administrative burden reduction using the DPP were identified. In this paper, we zoom in further on one of these dimensions, namely the potential of DPP to streamline cross-legislation and cross-jurisdictional compliance. By performing in-depth interpretative analysis of the ideas related to this theme, a rich understanding of this potential was elaborated. While administrative burden reduction, from a theoretical perspective, has been studied before in the eGovernment and international trade literature, DPP had previously not been taken into account. This study advances this theoretical discussion by introducing DPPs as part of the scientific discourse.

From engaging with the logistics community, as well as in discussions with companies and government authorities two things become evident. First, more and more new regulation requires data and insights from deep into the supply chains of companies placing products on the EU market. As a result, many businesses are deeply concerned how to collect and make available that information for compliance purposes. Secondly, authorities are concerned how they can monitor the implementation of such regulations and trust data that comes from countries way beyond the EU’s jurisdiction.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is one example of a regulation that requires extreme levels of transparency and timelines of implementation are approaching fast. Many businesses are facing this regulation with big concerns of what to do and how to be compliant, looking for quick solutions to meet the regulatory deadlines. At the same time, we see relevant developments such as Digital Product Passports (DPP) and related pilots driven by other regulations (e.g. the Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation (ESPR)), with different timelines, which may bring pieces of the puzzle needed to address challenges related to the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) but potentially also others. A big question then remains: how to be compliant in the short run to meet the requirements of EUDR, while keeping an eye on the future to avoid investing in silo solutions for every new legislation.

In this paper we will not give a specific solution and answer, as the solutions and answers will depend on the specific company’s situation and how companies decide to act. However, what we will do is provide an overview of some current developments, reports, and pilots related to Digital Product Passports. While these developments related to DPP may be very well known for people working in that area, for many parties that have not yet been affected by legislative developments that require DPP but already need to comply with legislations such as EUDR and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) this overview may be informative and insightful. It is this audience that this paper aims to reach. We hope that by providing insights into the DPP developments to parties not yet affected and aware of these developments but affected by other legislations, this will allow them to take a broader perspective and rethink their strategies, taking a broader view and a long-term perspective.

This document provides a structured summary and analysis of contributions gathered through an expert consultation process exploring the potential of Digital Product Passports (DPPs) to reduce the reporting burden for organizations.

Im Rahmen des „Green Deal“ der EU soll ein digitaler Batterieproduktpass eingeführt werden, einschließlich der Verfügbarkeit dynamischer Live-Daten während der Nutzung. In einem Pilotprojekt der TU Delft und dem Hyundai Motor Europe Technical Center, unter Beteiligung niederländischer Behörden (Zoll und RDW), TNO, ARN, Dukosi sowie Mobis und Kia Europe, in Kooperation mit dem EU-finanzierten Datapipe-Projekt, konnten Erfahrungen mit dem Batteriezellpass in der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Industrie, Wissenschaft und Behörden gesammelt werden.

Die in der EU eingeführte Batterieverordnung verpflichtet Wirtschaftsakteure, die Batterien auf dem EU-Markt anbieten, zur Bereitstellung eines digitalen Batteriepasses [1]. Dies betrifft zwangsläufig auch den Automobilsektor und damit europäische und ausländische Unternehmen, die Elektrofahrzeuge (Battery Electric Vehicles, BEVs) auf dem EU-Markt anbieten. Eine Herausforderung für die betroffenen Unternehmen besteht darin, dass die Informationen im Batteriepass eine breite Palette von Datenpunkten abdecken müssen – darunter statische Daten über die Batterie, ihren Hersteller, Materialzusammensetzung, Recyclinganteil sowie dynamische Daten wie den Ladezustand. Behörden und andere Parteien wie sogenannte Second-Use Manufacturers müssen auf diese Informationen zugreifen und sie für die Überwachung der Einhaltung von Vorschriften sowie zur Förderung der Kreislaufwirtschaft nutzen können.

Während sich andere Batteriepassprojekte hauptsächlich mit dem Verständnis der durch die Batterieverordnung geforderten Datenattribute oder der Lösung technischer IT-Herausforderungen beschäftigten, arbeitet das hier vorgestellte Projekt an einem realen Anwendungsfall mit Beteiligung von Unternehmen und Behörden. Dabei wurde ein Batteriezellpass in ein Fahrzeug implementiert, das nach der Produktion in Korea nach Europa importiert wurde. Das Pilotprojekt konzentrierte sich auf die Gewinnung von Erkenntnissen unter Berücksichtigung technischer und organisatorischer Aspekte. Es stellt den weltweit ersten Realversuch mit einem Batteriepass im Zusammenwirken von Industrie und Behörden dar.

The EU Green Deal and the ensuing policies and regulations to stimulate the transition toward a circular economy pose challenges to policymakers and authorities. Taking planetary boundaries into account is a nascent topic on all regulatory levels, and data-driven policymaking and its implementation require the collection and access to new types of data in all policy-making phases, from agenda-setting to policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Extant studies into data-driven policymaking have not yet addressed which information types are needed and how policymakers and enforcement agencies can gain access to data sources, whereas the urgency to prepare for this is high. We use the lens of the policy cycles to assess the required data. In three typical cases, we explore the data sources at different policy levels of monitoring to develop a conceptual framework of data attributes to inform policymakers. We position that the extant data used in the policy phases for the transition to the circular economy are different from the familiar data that public administrations use in their respective domains. Our conceptual framework provides an initial overview of new types of data and potential shared use among the policy phases to support policymakers and enforcement agencies to timely prepare for access to the relevant data and data sources. We recommend the creation of data ecosystems for public administrations, the adoption of new capabilities for CE literacy, exploring the added value of Digital Product Passports, and AI-based tools and mechanisms to handle large volumes of data to structure messy data.

As part of the EU’s Green Deal, a digital battery product passport is to be introduced, including the availability of dynamic live data during use. In a pilot project conducted by TU Delft and the Hyundai Motor Europe Technical Center, with the participation of Dutch authorities (Customs and RDW), as well as TNO, ARN, Dukosi, Mobis, and Kia Europe, and in cooperation with the EU-funded Datapipe project, experience with the cell battery passport was gained through collaboration between industry, research, and authorities.

As interest in circular economy governance grows, effective policymaking requires the creation and continuous monitoring of circular policies. In response, governments worldwide are seeking data and developing indicators to monitor and report progress within their jurisdictions. In recent years, this has led to a proliferation of monitoring frameworks at national, regional, and city levels. Nevertheless, existing research has yet to sufficiently address what types of information are essential for effective CE policymaking, how policymakers and enforcement agencies can access relevant data sources, and how information systems can support policymaking processes. This participatory workshop presents ongoing research on a conceptual framework that identifies key data attributes, information types, and digital infrastructures needed for CE policymaking. It aims to bring together researchers and policymakers working in open data, sustainability, smart cities, and evidence-based governance to discuss challenges, share best practices and build capacity through dialogue with fellow researchers and policymakers.

Facilitating Circular Economy (CE)’s monitoring requires access to data from different systems and data spaces. Motivated by this, a number of organizations have established data sharing agreements in line with the European Interoperability Framework to facilitate technical, semantic, organisational, and legal interoperability. Each data space, however, may follow its own domain-specific semantics. While this supports data’s interoperability within the data space, it also poses a challenge in cases such as CE’s monitoring, which requires data from several data spaces to be accessed, combined and analyzed. Supporting findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data sharing not only within but also between data spaces is key. Ontology alignment can help facilitate semantic interoperability across data spaces and support CE’s monitoring. Following this, we present an upper-ontology-based alignment approach to aid CE’s monitoring in practice. We showcase the implementation of the approach for aligning the FEDeRATED upper-level ontology for data sharing with the RePlanIT (electronics), BattINFO (batteries) ontologies and the Catena-X (cars) data model. As a result, the alignments can be used by parties interested in data sharing between the battery, electronics and car data spaces to generate data sharing agreements, define data access controls and ultimately monitor CE’s implementation. We also share lessons learned from the implementation of the approach and provide a discussion on future directions for semantic-enabled CE monitoring.

Cross-border eCommerce flows from non-EU countries with direct product delivery to consumers in the European Union have been rapidly growing. Whereas monitoring eCommerce flows for aspects such as Value- Added Tax (VAT), and safety and security already is a high priority, the increasing volumes bring new concerns. Such concerns include how to ensure that the products are sustainably produced and how to ensure a level playing field with products that are produced in the EU or imported via other modes of transport that are subject to more thorough checks at the border. These challenges have become new priorities in EU policy documents. Currently, authorities receive limited information related to eCommerce goods (particularly the low-value consignments that are exempted from duties), which hampers their risk assessment. Recently, Digital Product Passports (DPPs) have been introduced in legislation as a tool to inform consumers, recyclers, and market surveillance authorities about the material and manufacturing aspects of products. These DPPs promise to contain rich data that can be used to enhance both the monitoring and the customs risk assessment of cross-border eCommerce flows. To assess the exact potential and added value of DPPs, we analyze international eCommerce flows in the context of the EU-funded project PARSEC. We identify potential areas where DPPs can be relevant for eCommerce monitoring and risk assessment and present follow-up research directions on this topic.

Pre-print paper to be presented at the EGOV2025 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART’25, August 31 – September 4, 2025, Krems, Austria and is to appear in the the CEUR-WS Proceedings of Ongoing Research, Practitioners, Posters, Workshops, and Projects of the International Conference EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2025.

Cross-border eCommerce flows from non-EU countries with direct product delivery to consumers in the European Union have been rapidly growing. Whereas monitoring eCommerce flows for aspects such as Value- Added Tax (VAT), and safety and security already is a high priority, the increasing volumes bring new concerns. Such concerns include how to ensure that the products are sustainably produced and how to ensure a level playing field with products that are produced in the EU or imported via other modes of transport that are subject to more thorough checks at the border. These challenges have become new priorities in EU policy documents. Currently, authorities receive limited information related to eCommerce goods (particularly the low-value consignments that are exempted from duties), which hampers their risk assessment. Recently, Digital Product Passports (DPPs) have been introduced in legislation as a tool to inform consumers, recyclers, and market surveillance authorities about the material and manufacturing aspects of products. These DPPs promise to contain rich data that can be used to enhance both the monitoring and the customs risk assessment of cross-border eCommerce flows. To assess the exact potential and added value of DPPs, we analyze international eCommerce flows in the context of the EU-funded project PARSEC. We identify potential areas where DPPs can be relevant for eCommerce monitoring and risk assessment and present follow-up research directions on this topic.

To facilitate the transition toward a circular economy (CE), EU policymakers are drafting new policies and legislations at a high speed. This affects a wide set of sectors and leads to legislative complexity. At the same time, the legislative developments requiring Digital Product Passports (DPPs) offer opportunities for governments to tap into a rich set of business supply chain data for CE and sustainability monitoring. Nevertheless, the diversity of these legislative initiatives leads to complexity for governments on what needs to be monitored. There is a need to reduce legislative complexity, to have a more clear view on what governments need to monitor, which in turn would provide more clarity on the types of business data from the Digital Product Passports and digital infrastructures governments may need to access for CE and sustainability monitoring purposes. One approach to reduce the legislative complexity is to have a framework of high-level concepts for CE and sustainability monitoring. The question, however, is how to arrive at such a framework of high-level concepts. In this paper, we explore the potential of the concepts found in the UN Recommendation 46 (initially developed for the traceability of textiles), to serve as a basis for a generic framework of high-level concepts for CE and sustainability monitoring. We examine the suitability by applying the concepts from UN Recommendation 46 to a variety of legislations beyond textiles. Our analysis suggests that the framework has the potential to serve as a high-level framework of CE and sustainability monitoring concepts across sectors, and we identify several areas for further research.

The transition from a linear economy towards a circular economy (CE), based on reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing materials and products, is one of the key priorities in pursuing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), where governments play a fundamental role, with the support of digital technologies.

Despite the increasing global policy focus on CE, research on the role of digital government in initiating, implementing, and consolidating a transition towards a circular economy is surprisingly scarce and fragmented, and a systematic effort in digital government research is yet to emerge.

To tackle this issue, this article sets out to answer the research question: what is the role of digital government in the transition towards a circular economy? Driven by this research question, we conduct a review on 88 empirical studies in the Information Systems (IS) and digital government fields and discuss existing research foci and gaps in relation to the types of digital technologies used, the types of stakeholders involved, the stages of the product life cycle, and the type of resources that governments draw on to advance the circular economy transition. In addition, we identify two types of transition styles, based on an analysis of the types of roles taken by the government in two cases of transition towards a circular economy.

Based on these findings, we provide two contributions to establishing a new line of research in digital government and the circular economy: an analytical framework, including a static view, a longitudinal view, and a transition style view of the role of digital government in the circular economy transition; and a research agenda that builds on our framework, to guide future research on the role of digital government in the circular economy transition.

To access business data for compliance monitoring of the circular economy (CE), governments would need to deal with issues of both legislative complexities arising from many new regulations in the area of CE and sustainability, as well as the digital complexity for accessing business data that resides in different business systems and data spaces. While earlier research has touched upon (1) the legal complexity through the identification of common high-level concepts of what to monitor, and (2) the digital complexities through the use of upper ontologies, so far these aspects have been treated to a large extent in isolation and not been linked systematically. In this research in progress paper, we propose an approach on how to link the two, discuss advances in the area and limitations, and identify areas that need to be addressed to allow governments to tap into the rich business data sources for compliance monitoring in the future.

Monitoring the circular economy (CE) transition requires data sharing and collaboration between public and private actors. However, businesses are reluctant to share data with authorities for monitoring purposes due to fear of losing control over sensitive data. The emerging technology Multi-Party Computation (MPC), which enables collaborative data analysis while maintaining data control, could address barriers in business-to-government (B2G) data sharing and collaboration. This ongoing research aims to explore the potential of MPC in facilitating B2G data sharing and collaboration for CE monitoring under the conditions of inter-organizational trust and data control. Drawing on a B2G data sharing framework, our initial findings suggest that MPC can benefit authorities in accessing sensitive business data, while businesses can benefit from controlling shared data for compliance reporting. As MPC can be deployed in various architectures, the next research steps are to examine links between variants of MPC architectures and different data-sharing solutions.

The transition towards a circular economy (CE) will require data sharing across different platforms and data spaces of parties operating in a variety of supply chains. From a circular economy compliance monitoring perspective, beyond the access to mandatory data that governments will receive, authorities may benefit from accessing additional business data from the source on a voluntary basis, which is challenging. While platforms and data spaces solve a great deal of complexity and interoperability within their realm, platform, and data space interoperability is still challenging. In the logistics domain, efforts have been made to overcome these issues of data sharing across logistics platforms with a Semantic data sharing architecture developed by the CEF FEDeRATED Action, at the heart of which is a semantic model aligning other semantic models for logistics. In this paper, we take the Semantic data sharing architecture as a point of departure and examine the opportunities and limitations that it has for CE monitoring, and how it relates to other developments in the EU and beyond. Many of these developments acknowledge the need for data access across heterogeneous systems and – processes of actors; others add security and trust to data sharing that goes all the way to the level to cover legal obligations. The goal of this paper is to gain further insights into how data sharing across multiple platforms and data spaces enables circular economy monitoring, where government organizations would need to address the issue of how they would interface with, and access data that resides in multiple platforms and data spaces. We found that the various models can be aligned on some architecture principles that promote interoperability across dimensions (e.g. federation, keeping data at the source), yet they still differ on other dimensions (e.g. data model and semantics, as well as how they address issues of identification, authentication and authorization). We suggest further efforts towards developing meta-level agreements and standardization for data space interoperability and we propose further research directions on that topic.

Circular economy (CE) and sustainability are high on the political agenda of governments nationally and internationally. We see different regulatory developments where governments aim to put stricter rules and requirements towards businesses to ensure the transition toward a more circular and sustainable future. The use of digital infrastructures, including transparency systems and digital product passports is starting to play a vital role in supporting governments in their CE monitoring efforts. Yet there are challenges to be overcome. Many government procedures are set up in laying out very detailed requirements about what one government agency can do in a singular phase of the circular process (e.g., customs performing specific checks at the border) or a single Member State (e.g., organizing Extended Producer Responsibility in a specific country). While these efforts are valuable building stones towards CE monitoring, they are fragmented, and blank spots in CE monitoring occur when borders are crossed, and another country needs to take over the CE monitoring tasks. As for circularity, even if many efforts are spent by a single government agency or a single country, all these efforts may be in vain if the proper CE monitoring of the next step is not secured. While earlier research identified this problem, there is still limited understanding of the problem itself and directions to address it systematically. In this paper, following up on earlier research and with insights gained from an EU project on CE monitoring, we shed further light on the problem. More specifically we conceptualize CE monitoring by putting the CE flows at the center and exploring deficiencies for governments and businesses to safeguard the monitoring of CE flows. We examine two routes that can be followed to ensure continued CE monitoring when borders are crossed, namely the government route, as well as the business route (enabled by traceability systems and in-control mechanisms of businesses). We discuss the need for a global governance layer that can facilitate both routes and propose further directions to advance CE monitoring by taking a global perspective.