How do you put NFC into a product you manufacture?

The law that changed the question

Putting a tag in a product used to be a marketing decision. For products placed on the market of the European Union it is becoming a legal one: regulation (EU) 2024/1781, the ecodesign regulation, provides that products covered by a delegated act can only be placed on the market when a digital product passport is available, and its Chapter III says what that passport has to be.

The regulation covers product groups one by one. Article 18 required a first working plan by 19 April 2025 and named the groups it had to prioritise: iron and steel, aluminium, textiles, in particular garments and footwear, furniture including mattresses, tyres, detergents, paints, lubricants, chemicals, and energy related products. Batteries have their own text, regulation (EU) 2023/1542, whose battery passport applies from 18 February 2027.

This site describes what those texts say and points at them. It gives no compliance advice: which act covers your product, and what it requires of you, is a question for the text and for your own counsel.

What a carrier has to do

The passport is data on a server; what sits on the product is the way in. Article 10 requires the passport to be connected through a data carrier to a persistent unique product identifier, and the carrier to be physically present on the product, its packaging or the documentation accompanying it, as the applicable delegated act specifies.

The definition of a data carrier is deliberately wide: a linear barcode symbol, a two dimensional symbol, or other automatic identification data capture medium that can be read by a device. An NFC tag is such a medium, and so is a printed code; the delegated act for a product group specifies which one or ones apply, which is why the carrier page starts from the act rather than from the technology.

Getting the tag inside the product

A tag inside a manufactured object meets the physics the rest of this site covers, in harder conditions: a metal body, a battery behind it, a moulding process, a wash cycle. What a tag is made of and how far it reads belong to the tags and cards section, and what to write on it to the writing section; this section is about the product around it.

The decisions arrive early. A tag position survives tooling, a material choice survives the process, and both are settled long before anyone taps the finished object, which is why testing a tag in a prototype is part of the design rather than of the launch.

What happens after the sale

A passport is not a launch campaign: Article 9 says it must remain available for a period that corresponds to at least the expected lifetime of the product, and Article 11 keeps it available even after the company behind it has stopped trading. The tag has to survive that long, and so does the address it points at.

Which opens the uses that outlive the purchase: the manual, the warranty, the repair record, the recall, and the recycler who takes the product apart. They share one requirement, an identifier that still resolves, and that is the thread this section follows.