Copper is not included in the EU’s list of first-wave Digital Product Passport (DPP) regulation. The first ESPR Working Plan, adopted in April 2025, prioritises iron and steel, aluminium, textiles, tyres, furniture and mattresses. It is a strategic raw material classified by the EU, however and a candidate for the 2028 mid-term ESPR review, but no more than that.
That absence is misleading. Copper is already inside several passports but does not require its own. It enters the EU market as the current collector in a battery cell, the winding in a traction motor, the conductor in a wiring harness. Wherever the finished product is regulated, the copper inside it inherits the obligation.
Two dates matter now. From 18 February 2027, every EV, LMT and industrial battery above 2 kWh placed on the EU market requires a battery passport under Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 — the first legally binding DPP in EU law, carrying roughly 80 mandatory attributes. And Regulation (EU) 2026/1738 on vehicle circularity, in force since August 2026 and applying from 1 September 2028, introduces the Circularity Vehicle Passport and requires that end-of-life treatment permit recovery of high-grade copper. Copper is also a strategic (not critical) raw material under the Critical Raw Materials Act, with 2030 benchmarks of 10% EU extraction, 40% processing and 25% recycling.
Case Study 1: Copper Foil and Busbars in an EV Battery Pack
An EV battery pack contains several kilograms of copper: anode current collector foil, cell interconnects, module busbars.
The Battery Regulation’s due diligence obligations — postponed to August 2027 under Regulation (EU) 2025/1561 — cover cobalt, lithium, nickel and natural graphite; copper is not on that list. But the passport’s material composition and carbon footprint capture it anyway, and the footprint declaration must be plant-specific.
This is where the chain breaks. Copper cathode is an LME-grade commodity: fungible, warehoused, blended and traded through intermediaries before a foil maker e.g. in East Asia rolls it to six microns thickness. The cell manufacturer needs a defensible emissions figure for that foil. The refiner can supply a corporate or site average, rarely a batch-specific one, and treats concentrate origin and power contracts as confidential. The requesting OEM, legally responsible for the passport, must stand behind numbers it neither generated nor can verify, and keep them accurate for the life of the pack.
Case Study 2: The Wiring Harness Under the Circularity Vehicle Passport
A modern vehicle carries 20 to 30 kg of copper in its harness alone, plus motor windings, connectors and busbars. The OEM must publish removal instructions, document materials and components in the Circularity Vehicle Passport, and design for treatment that recovers copper at usable quality.
Harnesses are among the most fragmented items in the bill of materials: labour-intensive, assembled in Morocco, Tunisia, Romania or Serbia by Tier-2 and Tier-3 suppliers, and configured per vehicle option — so passport data must be handled at variant level, not model level. Sub-assembly BOMs are also what suppliers guard most closely.
There is a second-order effect. Copper is the classic “tramp element” in steel recycling; harness copper left in the shredder degrades the steel fraction. Design-for-disassembly therefore serves two metals at once, and dismantlers need passport data precise enough to locate the copper mass.
The Recycling Gap
Copper’s high recycling rate is usually cited as a reason it needs less regulation. In practice, recycling is where passport logic strains hardest.
Legacy stock carries no data. Copper entering scrap today was installed 15 to 50 years ago, long before any passport existed. For a generation, passport-obligated products will be fed with material that has no record at all — so recycled-content figures will rest on declarations, not lineage.
Custody dissolves in the furnace. European smelters run concentrates and secondary material through the same primary process at some sites and secondary-only at others; the cathode is Grade A either way. Segregation is technically possible and commercially punitive, so recycled content will be certified by mass balance — and the ESPR and ELV implementing acts defining acceptable methodology are still pending.
Pre-consumer scrap inflates the numbers. Production runaround returned to the melt is genuinely recycled but adds no circularity. Without a strict post-consumer definition, claims drift upward.
The passport dies at end-of-waste. When a harness becomes waste, the product legally ceases to exist and its passport has no defined successor. End-of-waste criteria remain national, and the digital waste shipment procedures introduced in 2026 form a parallel data track that does not connect to the DPP registry. A vehicle scrapped in 2043 also needs a passport maintained by a company that may no longer exist.
Scrap still leaves the EU. The CRMA’s 25% recycling benchmark competes directly with export demand for European copper scrap — a policy tension no passport resolves.
Where the Pressure Lands
Mines hold site-level ESG credentials but almost no product-level data, and concentrates are often blended before they reach a smelter. Smelters face the structural problem above. Fabricators are asked for batch-level footprints while adding secondary input that dilutes whatever data they received. Component manufacturers are most exposed: thin margins, limited digital maturity, a different template from every customer. OEMs carry decade-long accountability for data they cannot verify. Recyclers are the intended beneficiaries, yet their access depends on tiered permissions the passport operator controls.
The Next Twelve Months
Map where your copper sits inside regulated end products, not inside your own catalogue. Choose and document a chain-of-custody model before a customer chooses one for you. Secure plant-specific supplier data while it is still a negotiation rather than a condition of supply. And prepare a position for the 2028 ESPR mid-term review: whoever arrives with a workable mass-balance methodology will shape the rules rather than absorb them.
Regulatory basis: Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 (ESPR); Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 (Batteries), as amended by (EU) 2025/1561; Regulation (EU) 2026/1738 (vehicle circularity); Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 (CRMA).
Mark Hoff, OROCON GmbH, 06 September 2026 hoff@orocon.com
