One URL
The passport is the URL. There is no login, no account, and no complicated deep linking. A QR on the label resolves straight to it, and an auditor who types it in lands on the same record.
Digital Product Passport
A DPP built and kept current.
A Digital Product Passport is a public record of what a product is made from, where it came from, and where it goes at the end of its life. The EU is phasing this in category by category, starting with batteries in February 2027. TalkPod builds yours and hosts it, keeping it accurate as the rules and your products change, all at a web address a customer and an auditor can open.
The basics
What is a passport, and when do you need one?
- 01
What is a Digital Product Passport?
A structured record about a single product at a stable URL, readable by a human on a phone and by the machines that verify it. The same passport answers the auditor and the customer. Until now, that data was scattered across supplier sheets, lab reports, PIM fields, and certificates, never in one place.
- 02
What goes inside one?
The delegated acts set the exact fields per category. Broadly: materials and substances, country and facility of manufacture, recycled content, repair and spare parts information, end-of-life routes, and a stable identifier. Textiles add care and chemical safety; machinery adds energy and emissions.
- 03
Who needs one and when?
Only the battery passport has a fixed, mandatory date: 18 February 2027 under the Battery Regulation. Under the ESPR, textiles come first, with compliance expected around late 2028 to 2029. Furniture, mattresses, tyres, iron, steel, and aluminium follow as their acts are adopted. Construction products run on a separate track, phasing in per product family.
- 04
Where does the data live?
Wherever it already lives: PIM (Akeneo, inriver, Pimcore), ERP (NetSuite, Sage, SAP, Dynamics), ecommerce (Shopify, BigCommerce), or a spreadsheet for a small range. The passport is built from the source, structured to the schema, and held as a record of its own, kept current as your data changes through a review you sign off. Nothing has to move to be compliant.
Category timeline, drawn from the first ESPR working plan (2025) and published delegated-act process. Marked "expected" where dates are not yet confirmed. For the full year-by-year schedule to 2030, see the DPP regulatory timeline.
- Mandatory 18 Feb 2027
Batteries
Under the EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542, not ESPR. The battery passport is required from 18 February 2027 for EV, industrial (over 2 kWh) and light-means-of-transport batteries. The one firm category deadline.
- Act expected 2027
Textiles and apparel
An ESPR priority group, covering branded apparel and home textiles. Compliance is set in the delegated act, roughly eighteen months after adoption, so expected around late 2028 to 2029. Footwear sits outside the current working plan pending a Commission study.
- Act expected 2027
Tyres
An ESPR priority group, in the first wave alongside textiles. Compliance follows once the act is adopted.
- Acts expected 2026 to 2027
Iron, steel and aluminium
ESPR priority intermediate products. Iron and steel is expected to be adopted first, aluminium alongside textiles and tyres.
- Act expected 2028
Furniture
An ESPR priority group. Wood-based and upholstered furniture, with compliance following the act.
- Act expected 2029
Mattresses
An ESPR priority group, handled alongside furniture in the first working plan.
- Phased under the CPR
Construction products
Under the Construction Products Regulation 2024/3110, not ESPR. DPPs phase in per product family, roughly eighteen months after each delegated act, with no single deadline.
Example
A finished passport, at model and item level.
The card here is the live passport for a Forgewell HD 130 Pro pressure washer (machinery-2028 schema, GTIN 5060421038719). Click through and the auditor, the customer scanning the QR, and anyone curious all land at the same address. Every published field is filled in, and where something is genuinely missing, the passport says so plainly.
Public passport valid
Forgewell
HD 130 Pro Pressure Washer
- Materials
- Steel 52%, polymer 18%, brass 14%
- Power
- 2.5 kW · 230 V · IPX5
- Recycled content
- 38% by mass
- End of life
- Take-back scheme, battery-free
GTIN 5060421038719 Open the full passport →
Every change logged
Every field change is recorded: timestamp, who made it, previous value. The history is in the dashboard, so a compliance team can see what changed when, and walk it back if anyone asks.
Honest about what is missing
Where a field cannot be answered yet, it is marked incomplete rather than filled in with a placeholder. The passport says what it knows and what it does not, and the score is honest about both.
Regulatory detail
Where we stand on the published acts.
Our read on the published acts, and where we don't take a position. If it contradicts your compliance advisor, defer to them. Technical terms are in the A to Z.
- Legal basis
- ESPR (Regulation 2024/1781), Article 9 and the per-category delegated acts. Textiles is the first category in preparation under the delegated-act process; the first ESPR working plan lists the prioritised group through to the end of the decade. EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542 is the parallel basis for batteries, with passport requirements applying from 18 February 2027 for industrial and electric-vehicle batteries.
- Identifier
-
GS1 GTIN is the default product identifier. Per-unit serial
is added where the category requires it (currently
batteries, and likely machinery on certain classes).
Passport URLs are GTIN-scoped at
talkpod.ai/passport/<gtin>; serial-scoped URLs append the serial as a path segment when the category requires it. - Schema
-
Per-category schemas align to the CIRPASS reference model
and the published delegated-act fields. Current live schemas
are
textiles-2027andmachinery-2028. Future schemas land on the published delegated-act timetable. - Data residency
- Customer product data is stored on EU infrastructure (Neon Postgres, AWS eu-west-1). Conversational inference (Claude) runs through Anthropic's EU region where available and is contractually excluded from training. Full subprocessor list at /trust.
- What we do
- Read product data from your existing systems, map it to the published schema for your category, host the passport at a stable URL, version every change, expose machine-readable JSON-LD alongside the human-readable view, and serve QR codes that resolve to the same record.
- What we don't do
- We don't write regulation for you, certify your compliance, substitute for a notified body or testing house, or replace your DPP registry filing where the category requires central registration. The passport we host is the presentation layer; the legal certification stays with you.
- Where the uncertainty is
- Several delegated acts are still in draft. Our schema tracks the published version and updates with each act, so if you build against a draft today, some fields will move. We keep in step with what's published; beyond that we don't pretend to know yet.
How TalkPod helps
The record does more than sit in a passport.
Plenty of passport vendors stop once the regulation is satisfied. The record TalkPod builds keeps going: the same data answers your customers in the product's own voice, and makes the QR on your packaging worth scanning.
- PIM
- ERP
- Ecommerce
- Feed or CSV
Read where it lives. Nothing migrates.
The record live
Forgewell
HD 130 Pro Pressure Washer
- Schema
- machinery-2028
- GTIN
- 5060421038719
The record at a stable URL, for auditors and anyone with the link.
/passport/5060421038719 The same record, answering customer questions on the label, the site or in store.
"What's it made of?" For the detail on how TalkPod approaches the regulation, data residency, and audit trail, see the compliance page.
One more thing
Retail is switching to QR codes, and your passport is ready for it.
A second change is happening alongside DPP, and it's industry-led rather than regulatory. GS1's Sunrise 2027 plan asks retail point-of-sale scanners worldwide to read two-dimensional codes (QR and Data Matrix carrying GS1 Digital Link URLs) alongside the EAN-13 barcode retail has used for fifty years. It isn't a law, but the major global retailers are aligned behind it.
TalkPod's passport sits at two URLs that resolve to the
same record: the readable form
talkpod.ai/passport/<gtin> and the
GS1 Digital Link form
talkpod.ai/01/<gtin>. The QR you
print on the label encodes the Digital Link form by
default, so a single scan satisfies the regulatory
side and gives the customer a route into the product.