Which product category does my product fall under?

What you must do concretely

What is expected of you

The ESPR itself does not work with a single list stating exactly "this product belongs to that product group". The regulation provides a framework (definitions, criteria, prioritisation rules), and for each product group, a delegated act specifies exactly what falls within it and what requirements apply. For a company, this means determining its own product group is a matter of investigation, not simply looking it up in the law.

Applying the product definition from Article 2 to your own assortment

Article 2 of the ESPR defines what counts as a "product" under the regulation and which concepts are used. For a company with 10 to 100 employees, this means in practice that each item in the assortment must be tested against this definition: is it a physical product placed on the EU market, or is it a service, component, packaging or something else that falls outside the core of the definition? For companies that themselves produce components that are then incorporated into another end product, this step is not always straightforward — a component may itself fall under one product group, while the end product falls under a different group (or no group yet).

Following which product groups receive priority

Article 18 describes how the Commission prioritises product groups and schedules them for a delegated act. This is relevant because not every product group receives concrete requirements at the same time. For a company, this means monitoring this schedule is necessary to know when its own product is concretely due. A company selling electronics, textiles and furniture faces different timelines in practice, because each product group has its own delegated act and its own implementation date. How this sequence is structured is described on the page on the order in which product categories come up.

Determining whether your own product falls under the ESPR at all

Before the question "which product group" becomes relevant, there is the question of whether a product falls under the ESPR. Not every physical product is automatically in scope; the regulation targets products placed on the EU market for which ecological requirements are meaningful and achievable. A company that is uncertain whether a specific item counts or not should test this per product — the page does the digital product passport apply to my products goes deeper into that test.

Taking into account products that belong to multiple groups

Some products have characteristics of multiple product groups at the same time, or consist of components that each fall under a separate group. For a company of this size, which often makes composite products (electronics with textiles, furniture with electronic components), this is a realistic scenario. What this means in practice for classification and for possibly multiple passports per product is explained on the page my product falls into multiple groups.

Where things go wrong in practice

A few situations come up repeatedly with companies preparing for this.

Classification is made once and never reviewed afterwards. A company determines which product group it is in at the first assessment, but does not subsequently follow whether the delegated act for that group has been published or amended. Because the concrete requirements for each product group are developed separately, the content of those requirements can change without the company noticing.

Components and end products are lumped together. A manufacturer of, for example, an electrical appliance with a battery treats the whole thing as one product group, while the battery may fall under a different regime (the battery passport, for example, operates under its own regulation alongside the ESPR — see the difference between battery passport and digital product passport). This leads to an incomplete picture of what is actually needed for the whole product.

A new product model is not retested. With an assortment change — a new variant, a different material, an added electronic component — the product group classification of the old model is automatically carried over to the new one without checking whether this is still correct.

Companies wait for "the law" instead of waiting for the delegated act. Because the ESPR is a framework regulation, companies sometimes think that the concrete obligations follow directly from the ESPR text. In practice, it is the delegated act per product group that contains the actual requirements, data elements and data. What a delegated act is exactly and why it is decisive is explained on the page what is a delegated act.

Composite products (such as an e-bike) are treated as one simple case. An e-bike consists of a frame, a battery, electronics and more — components that in principle can each fall under a different product group or regulation. The example of how many product passports an e-bike needs shows how this type of composite products entails multiple layers of classification.

What you can document

• An overview per product model: which product group(s) apply, with the date on which this classification was determined and by whom.
• A reference to the specific delegated act (if published) that applies to the product group, including version or publication date.
• A note on composite products: which components have been assessed separately and what conclusion follows from this.
• A fixed control point for assortment changes, at which it is re-assessed whether the product group classification is still correct.
• A log of changes in the Commission's planning (Article 18), so that it can be tracked when a product group comes up for action.
• Underlying reasoning why a product does or does not fall within the definition of Article 2, in case this needs to be checked later.

For companies that want to understand more broadly what this classification means for their own business operations, the page on what the ESPR changes for small and medium-sized enterprises provides an overview of the relationship between product group classification and the obligations that follow from it.