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 delegated act expected in 2027 and compliance from around 2028, and other categories follow through the late 2020s. 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 can answer customer questions from the same record.
The basics
What a passport is, and when each category needs one.
- 01
What is a Digital Product Passport?
A structured record about a single product, accessible at a stable URL, readable by humans on a phone and by machines that need to verify it. The same passport answers the auditor's question and the customer's question. Before now, that data lived in supplier sheets, lab reports, PIM fields and certificates, none of which were a single place anyone could look.
- 02
What goes inside one?
The delegated acts decide the exact field list per category. In shape: materials and substances, country and facility of manufacture, recycled content, repair and spare parts information, end-of-life routes, and a stable product identifier (typically GTIN for retail, plus a unique serial where the category requires per-unit traceability). The textile act adds care instructions and chemical safety. Machinery adds energy and emissions.
- 03
Who needs one and when?
The category timeline below carries the published dates. Textiles come first, with the ESPR delegated act expected in 2027 and compliance roughly eighteen months after it's adopted. Batteries are already partway there under the EU Battery Regulation. Electronics, furniture and machinery land from 2028. Construction products, tyres and chemicals fill in by 2030.
- 04
Where does the data live?
Wherever your product data already lives. PIM (Akeneo, inriver, Pimcore), ERP (NetSuite, Sage, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics), ecommerce (Shopify, BigCommerce), or a Google Sheet for a small range. The passport reads from those sources, structures the record to the schema, and keeps it in step as the source data changes. Your product data doesn't move anywhere new 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.
- Act expected 2027
Textiles and apparel
First category in preparation under the ESPR delegated-act process, covering branded apparel and home textiles. Compliance lands roughly eighteen months after the act is adopted, so from around 2028. Footwear sits outside the current working plan pending a Commission study due at the end of 2027.
- In force, rolling
Batteries
EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542 already requires battery passports for industrial and electric-vehicle batteries, with broader rollout following.
- 2028 onwards, expected
Electronics, ICT and consumer goods
In the prioritised first ESPR working plan group. Small appliances, displays, consumer electronics.
- 2028 onwards, expected
Furniture
Wood-based and upholstered furniture in the prioritised first ESPR working plan group.
- 2028 onwards, expected
Iron, steel, aluminium and chemicals
In the prioritised first ESPR working plan group. Supports traceability across long heavy-materials supply chains.
- In the working plan
Tyres
Named in the first ESPR working plan. Delegated-act timing will be published as the process progresses.
Example
A real passport on a real product, viewable at model level and at item level after a repair event.
The card on the right is the passport for a Forgewell HD 130 Pro pressure washer, machinery-2028 schema, GTIN 5060421038719. Clicking through opens what an auditor would see, what a customer scanning the QR on the label sees, and what anyone curious sees, all at the same URL with nothing in the way. Completeness sits at 100% on the published fields, with the gaps (where they exist on other products) 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 passport-field change is recorded with a timestamp, who made it, and what the previous value was. The change history shows up in the dashboard, so a compliance team can see exactly what changed when, and walk back through it 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
The technical position, for the people who need it.
For compliance leads who need to verify the spec rather than read a marketing summary. The detail below is the position TalkPod takes on the published acts, and the parts we explicitly don't take a position on. If something here contradicts what your compliance advisor told you, their reading is the one to trust. For the technical terms, see 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
- The delegated acts for several categories are still in draft. Our schema mapping tracks the published version and updates with the act, but if you're building against a draft today, some fields will move by the time the final version is published. We keep in step with the published acts as they're released. Anything 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?" 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.