How do I record the delivery of passport data in my purchasing contract?

What you must concretely do

What is expected of you

A purchase contract for steel or iron semi-finished products normally covers price, delivery time and quality. With the product passport coming, a fourth topic is added: the provision of data. This is not a separate legal obligation independent of the ESPR — the obligations lie with the manufacturer, the importer and other actors in the supply chain, as described in Article 38 and Article 29 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1781. What a buyer can do is translate those obligations into agreements between parties, so that it is clear who delivers what, when and in what form.

Know who the obligated party is

Article 38 of the ESPR concerns actors in the supply chain: manufacturers, but also others who have relevant information about materials, processing or composition. For a purchasing company, this means that it is useful to know in advance which party in the chain will supply which part of the passport data. In a trade chain with multiple intermediaries, this is not always the party with whom the contract is signed. This distinction is precisely where things often go wrong, and it is the reason that some buyers choose to review which data must I request from my steel supplier before the contract text is drawn up.

Importers have their own position

When steel is purchased from outside the EU, Article 29 of the ESPR assigns an additional role to the importer. For a company of 10 to 100 employees that imports itself, this means that its own position in the chain changes: not only a recipient of data, but also a party with its own role towards its own customers further down the line. This is a different situation than purely purchasing within the EU, and it is worthwhile to reflect that distinction in the contract with the foreign supplier. More about that position is described on the page about what the product passport means if you import steel from outside the EU.

Make data that is already established reusable

Many of the data that will later appear in a passport — composition, origin, processing history — are often already recorded in certificates, material declarations or test reports. For a medium-sized company, it is practical to stipulate in the purchase contract that this existing documentation is delivered in a form that can be reused later, rather than waiting until there is a separate passport obligation.

Where things go wrong in practice

A number of situations come up regularly with companies that try to arrange data provision only afterwards.

First: the contract sets the delivery time and quality of the steel, but says nothing about the data that goes with it. If the supplier later does not respond to a request for additional information, the buyer is left empty-handed — there is then no contractual basis to claim anything. See also what to do when your supplier does not provide the data.

Second: when purchasing through an intermediary trader, it is assumed that this party will pass on the data from the original manufacturer. In practice, information is often lost this way, because the intermediary has no contractual obligation to forward anything.

Third: companies that purchase steel from multiple suppliers and process it into one assembled product discover late that the data from those suppliers is not delivered in the same format or the same units. This makes merging afterwards difficult. Those who encounter this can read how to combine data from different suppliers into one passport.

Fourth: a supplier outside the EU provides data, but the buyer has no way to verify it. Without an agreement on underlying evidence, it is difficult to establish afterwards whether the information is correct. See about this how do I know if data from my foreign supplier is correct.

Fifth: a supplier does not wish to share certain composition or process data due to business confidentiality, and the contract does not provide a solution for this. This leads to delays at the moment when the data are actually needed. See can I agree on an NDA and still comply with the passport for how this issue is described.

What you can document

Beyond the statutory obligations that apply to manufacturers and importers, a purchasing contract can contain a number of practical arrangements that facilitate subsequent data provision:

• A provision on which documentation is supplied with each delivery, such as material certificates, certificates of origin and test reports, with a description of the form (digital, structured, in which file format).
• An indication of the responsible party within the supply chain for submitting data, especially when intermediaries are involved.
• An agreement on updates, for situations in which data change or are supplemented after delivery.
• A provision on confidentiality, which indicates which data are shared with the customer and which are subject to a separate confidentiality arrangement.
• A reference to a standardised format, so that data from different suppliers can later be combined more easily.
• An agreement on verification, for example the right to request underlying supporting documents in case of doubt about the accuracy of supplied data. See also how do I check whether my supplier's data are correct.

For companies that process the steel after purchase into another product, it is also useful to include in the contract how the supplied data may be used in that processing. This responds to the question what happens to the product passport if steel is processed into another product.

These arrangements anticipate an obligation that has not yet come into force — the exact content of the product passport and the associated obligations will be determined per product group in a delegated act, as explained on the page on what a delegated act is and why it determines what must happen. Until this text is published, the precise requirements for the product passport remain unknown. What can already be done now is to organise the data flow between purchaser and supplier in such a way that a later connection to the product passport does not become a completely new exercise.