Lesson 2: Who Carries Which Duty
Lesson 2: Who Carries Which Duty
Module 2, Lesson 2 of 4. About 8 minutes.
Orientation
Lesson 1 placed your organisation on a map of contribution. This lesson answers the sharper question that follows: if something is wrong, who is actually on the hook. That is not the same question, and conflating them is how the wrong person ends up carrying risk they never agreed to, or the right person assumes someone else has it covered.
This matters most in the moment a passport is found to be missing, wrong or unreachable. Whoever an authority looks to first is decided by role, not by who happened to build the system or hold the spreadsheet.
From Lesson 1: name two of the six value chain groups in the Digital Product Passport Responsibility Model.
Show the answer
Any two of: brand owners, manufacturers, component and material suppliers, importers and distributors, retailers, service repair and recycling organisations.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
- M2-O2Distinguish the duties of a manufacturer, an importer, a distributor and an authorised representative.
Four Roles, Four Different Duties
Legal responsibility for a passport obligation is allocated by the applicable legislation to a defined economic operator, a legally recognised role such as manufacturer, importer or distributor. It is not allocated to whoever holds the data, whoever built the resolver, or whoever happens to have the most complete spreadsheet. That separation is worth holding onto deliberately, because contribution, contract terms and internal ownership all describe something real, but none of them rewrite who the law looks to.
Four roles carry the bulk of potential legal accountability, and each carries something distinct. The manufacturer commonly carries the widest set of obligations, because it is closest to the product’s design and construction, though the exact set depends on the specific measure that applies. The importer carries its own distinct duties when placing a product made outside the EU onto the EU market: it does not inherit the manufacturer’s obligations wholesale, and it does not replace them either, it holds a separate set triggered by the act of importing. The distributor carries due care duties when making a product available, which is a narrower standard than creating a passport from scratch. The authorised representative acts only under a written mandate and only for obligations that the applicable legislation permits to be delegated; it cannot invent authority the legislation does not grant it.
Two further groups matter without being at the centre. Online marketplaces and fulfilment service providers pick up specific duties only where a particular piece of relevant legislation defines them into scope, not automatically by virtue of hosting a listing or a warehouse. Suppliers, laboratories and technology providers sit further out again: they can carry real contractual and service responsibility, and a failure on their part can be commercially serious, but that is different from being the statutorily responsible operator for the finished product.
The common misreading is to treat “we signed a contract that puts this on our supplier” as equivalent to “our supplier now carries the legal duty”. A contract allocates cost, remedy and blame between the parties who signed it. It does not touch what the law says about who an authority may act against. An organisation can be contractually protected and still legally responsible at the same time, for the same failure.
Read the four role sections in sequence and note, for each, what triggers the duty and what the duty actually requires. The distinctions are precise and worth reading exactly as written rather than summarised.
Read: Who Is Legally Responsible for a Digital Product Passport? (15 min read)
Sections that carry this lesson:
- Manufacturer Responsibilities
- Importer Responsibilities
- Distributor Responsibilities
- Authorised Representatives
The article is the source of record. Where this lesson and the article differ, the article is correct.
The contract manufacturer in Vietnam builds the trimmer and holds the bill of materials, but has no direct EU obligation in most structures of this kind. The brand owner’s Dutch entity imports the finished product into the EU and is very likely the party carrying the passport obligation for this product, because the duty on placing a third-country product on the Union market usually lands on the importer. A retailer distributing the S2 carries due care duties, such as not obscuring the data carrier and verifying that a passport exists, but is not expected to create one. If the brand used an authorised representative in a market where it has no local presence, that representative would carry only the specific obligations named in its written mandate, and nothing beyond it.
Nobody in that chain should assume the contract manufacturer is “handling compliance” simply because it holds the most detailed technical data.
For one product you mapped in Lesson 1, write down which organisation you believe carries the legal duty, and separately, which organisation you have a contract with to supply or verify the underlying data. If those two names are different, write one sentence on what happens if the contracted party gets it wrong: who does the authority approach first, and what does your contract actually recover for you.
Knowledge Check
4 questions. Feedback is immediate, nothing is graded, and this does not gate your progress.
Takeaways
- Legal responsibility follows the operator role defined by the applicable legislation, not who holds the data or built the system.
- Manufacturers, importers, distributors and authorised representatives each carry a distinct set of duties, not a shared or interchangeable one.
- Contractual protection and legal responsibility are different things and can both apply to the same party at once.
- Marketplaces, fulfilment providers, suppliers and technology providers typically carry contractual, operational or service responsibility rather than statutory product responsibility.
If you remember one thing: a contract can move cost after a failure, it cannot move who the law was looking at when the failure happened.
Sources
This lesson draws on Who Is Legally Responsible for a Digital Product Passport?, sections Manufacturer Responsibilities, Importer Responsibilities, Distributor Responsibilities and Authorised Representatives.
Module 2 · Lesson 2 of 4
Checking this device for saved progress.
Previous: Where You Sit in the Value Chain
Progress is saved on this device.