One URL
The passport is the URL. No login, no account, no deep-link gymnastics. A QR on the label resolves directly to it. An auditor types it. They see the same record.
Digital Product Passport
A DPP built on the data you already hold.
Most physical products sold into the EU will need a Digital Product Passport (DPP) before the decade is out. Textiles come first under the ESPR, with the act expected in 2027 and compliance around late 2028 to 2029; other categories follow. TalkPod builds the passport on the same data layer that runs the product's pod, so the compliance work earns you a stable public URL and a product that answers customer questions from the same record.
The basics
What's a passport, and when are they needed?
- 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 (GTIN, plus a serial where the category needs per-unit traceability). Textiles add care and chemical safety; machinery adds energy and emissions.
- 03
Who needs one and when?
The category timeline below carries the dates. Only the battery passport is fixed, mandatory from 18 February 2027 under the Battery Regulation. Under ESPR, textiles come first, with the delegated act expected in 2027 and compliance roughly eighteen to twenty-four months after it is adopted, so around late 2028 to 2029. Furniture, mattresses, tyres, iron and steel and aluminium follow as their acts are adopted. Construction products run on a separate track under the CPR, 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 reads from the source, structures it to the schema, and keeps it in step as the data changes. 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 to twenty-four 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 real passport on a real product, at model and item level.
The card on the right 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 on the same URL. Completeness sits at 100% on the published fields; gaps, where they exist, are marked rather than hidden.
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.
Completeness, not bluff
Where a field can't be answered yet, it's marked "incomplete" rather than filled in with a placeholder. The passport says what it knows and what it doesn't, 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 already in force 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
One data layer underneath both the passport and the pod.
Most passport vendors stop at the passport. TalkPod doesn't. The data behind the passport also runs the product's pod, so a customer asking your product a question gets an answer from the same record that satisfies the regulation. One piece of work, two surfaces, one update.
- PIM
- ERP
- Ecommerce
- Feed or CSV
Read where it lives. Nothing migrates.
Data layer 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
The QR labelling change, sitting next to DPP.
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.