A revolution hidden behind acronyms – Reflections published from Shanghai

Author: Lina Svensberg

”Brussels – the Silicon Valley of regulation.”

Often said as a joke, or a complaint. In many ways, rightly so. But there is more to it than that. Silicon Valley disrupts markets. What’s happening in the EU right now is changing the rules of the game itself.

For many years I lived between Sweden and Barcelona. I had a Spanish phone contract, and a Swedish one, like everyone else in the same situation back then. And every time I flew between the countries, I swapped the SIM cards on the plane. Until one day I didn’t have to. And somewhere along the way, I also noticed I needed fewer and fewer cables, until eventually one USB-C charged everything. I hadn’t noticed the regulations behind either of those changes, and I wasn’t aware of the years of negotiations by EU bureaucrats in committee rooms in Brussels. But I noticed that I was doing things differently, as a result of them.

Acronyms. Policy reports are full of them. They don’t exactly spark joy. But together, they are part of a revolution. You know all those beautifully designed infographics about systems change that live in LinkedIn feeds and keynote presentations? This is what systems change actually looks like. And it’s boring, at least at a first glance.

I have spent some years working in the intersection of policy, practice and research, and I have discovered something. If you look at anything, closely enough, for long enough, eventually it becomes interesting. And this is more than interesting. The rules of the game are changing.

Rules as infrastructure

Rules are not just constraints. They are infrastructure. As Gillian Hadfield argues in Rules for a Flat World – they create the predictability that makes actors dare to invest, to take risks and to collaborate.
(You can read my reflection on her book here)

So when you change the rules, you change the playing field. And that is exactly what the EU is doing now, using regulation to help steer markets from a linear economy toward a more circular one. To illustrate that, I will take a closer look at a couple of the acronyms above, ESPR, and DPP, and the interplay between them and the new EU public procurement directives.

In Europe, circularity was for a long time mainly discussed in terms of waste and recycling. But recycling only takes you so far. You also want products to be used longer, before they become waste. The ESPR, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, is about that. Products need to be designed for durability, repair, reuse and circularity from the start. And to make that work, you need product-level information across the entire lifecycle, and that’s where the Digital Product Passport comes in.

The Digital Product Passport will, over time, apply to almost all physical products sold in the EU, regardless of where they’re manufactured. Each passport is a digital, machine-readable record, accessed via a QR code or RFID tag. It contains information about what a product is made of, where its materials came from, how it can be repaired, and what should happen to it at end of life, and updated across the product’s lifetime.

By 19 July 2026, less than three months from now, the European Commission must have the central DPP registry operational. Battery passports become mandatory from 18 February 2027 under the EU Battery Regulation, and ESPR-based passports are expected to follow for sectors such as textiles, electronics and furniture as product-specific rules are rolled out, sector by sector. If your product ends up on the EU market, you’re in the system: your customer will need your data to comply, and once a DPP is required, a product without a valid registered passport cannot legally be placed on the EU market.

Most people encountering ESPR for the first time ask: what do we have to do? It’s a reasonable question. But I think there is an even better question. What does this legislation want? If changing rules are a way of changing the playing field, and make actors play differently, what is the game that this legislation wants to see?

What does this legislation want?

The ESPR wants products to stay in use longer. It wants material flows to be visible across entire supply chains. It wants the information needed to repair, reuse and recycle a product to exist from the moment it’s designed, and to travel with it all the way to end of life. It wants the economy to be circular.

And this shift is also emphasized from the demand side and the new EU public procurement directives moving in the same direction.

The proposals on the table would make sustainability and circularity much more explicit criteria in public contracts. Together, they support each other: design for circularity, trace it through the lifecycle, and make circularity and traceability a requirement from the demand side as well.

Rethinking circular procurement

But to fully be able to play the new game, there is a mindshift needed.

For a long time, the dominant logic of public procurement has been: we have a need, how can you meet it? Specify the requirements, evaluate the bids, award the contract. For circular procurement, the same logic. Start with the need, write specifications that take circular principles into account, award a contract.

But circular solutions don’t emerge from specifications alone. They require innovation, experimentation and co-creation across the whole value network. When a designer, a manufacturer and a recycler figure out together what’s actually recoverable. Or when a buyer and a supplier jointly explore what a service-based business model could look like instead of a product-based one. That requires a different question: not only ”how can you meet our need?” But also ”how can we create value from this resource, together?”

And that requires a different perspective on procurement – one that sees it not primarily as a transaction, but as infrastructure for how risk and reward are shared, enabling collaboration, experimentation and innovation across whole value networks. And at the same time, making sure that the co-creation and experimentation happens in a way that stimulates competition, doesn’t lead to unfair competitive advantages for the companies involved. That’s what the public procurement legislation wants.

This is the light I want to see DPP and the revised procurement directives through – not as compliance tools, but as infrastructure for innovation and value creation across the whole value network.

Last month, in Suzhou, about an hour from Shanghai, NAFFIC, China’s National Advanced Functional Fiber Innovation Center, and AWARE, a Dutch supply chain traceability platform, launched what they described as the world’s first China-Europe Digital Product Passport for a textile product. It provides blockchain-verified traceability from recycled bottle to finished product. At the same event, China Unicom presented plans for a regional digital infrastructure to support carbon footprint tracking in the Yangtze River Delta.

”This is more than technology,” said one of the speakers. ”This is China and Europe working together. A new Digital Silk Road.”

But this brings a new question. Right now there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of traceability platforms, many built on a model where every participant uploads their data to that platform. As Steve Capell, who leads the UN Transparency Protocol working group at UN/CEFACT, puts it: that’s a bit like saying we can all pay each other money, as long as we all have an account at the same bank.

Under UNECE, the UN Transparency Protocol is being developed as exactly that: an open, non-proprietary standard that connects platforms rather than replacing them, and aims to provide a way for non-EU suppliers to meet DPP-style data requirements without being locked into a European platform architecture.
(Watch Steve Capell explain it here)

The rules of the game may be made in Europe. The technical infrastructure doesn’t have to be.

Behind the acronyms

Behind the acronyms, a new logic is being built. Not just new rules for products, but new infrastructure for how value is created, shared and recovered across entire material systems.

The companies and countries that understand this early won’t just be compliant. They’ll be positioned at the centre of it.

I started this article in Brussels – with its committee rooms and acronyms. We travelled through Suzhou, where the first China-Europe textile DPP was launched last month. And through Geneva, where the development of protocols for global interoperability and traceability is being coordinated.

And I’m ending it in Shanghai – because the revolution isn’t staying in Brussels. It’s already here.

Further reading

This is the third article in a series where I try to bridge the gap between EU policy and what it means in practice. Find the two previous ones here:

• What the Devil Wears Prada and transformative innovation have in common
• Rethinking Circular Procurement – Reflections from the EU’s policy journey for Taiwan’s circular transition