The JTC 24 standards suite — EN 18216 through EN 18223
The European Digital Product Passport is not one specification. It is a family of technical standards produced by CEN/CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24 (JTC 24), the committee set up specifically to translate the ESPR framework regulation into concrete, testable, machine-readable requirements.
Four of those standards form the backbone of every passport in production:
| Standard | Title | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| EN 18216 | Digital Product Passport — Data carrier and unique identifier | How the passport is addressed and how the physical product links to it |
| EN 18219 | Digital Product Passport — Resolver services | How the URL a scanner reads is redirected to the actual data, reliably, over time |
| EN 18221 | Digital Product Passport — Lifecycle continuity, backup and archival | How the passport remains resolvable after 10 years, insolvencies, and platform migrations |
| EN 18223 | Digital Product Passport — Structure and interoperability | The data model that lets any authorised reader parse a passport it has never seen before |
Together they answer the four questions any regulator, importer, retailer or downstream lifecycle actor will ask about a DPP: where do I find it, how do I read it, will it still be there in ten years, and does the format mean the same thing across systems?
Why the split matters
CIRPASS-1 (2022–2023) proved the DPP concept with a single monolithic profile. That was fine for pilots. Once ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) took effect and delegated acts started appearing for individual product categories, industry needed the concerns to be separable. A textile brand does not want the identifier standard renegotiated every time the recycling-content methodology changes for batteries. A backup provider does not want lifecycle continuity requirements re-opened every time schema.org publishes a new alias.
The JTC 24 split gives each standard a stable scope, a defined maintenance track, and independent versioning. A brand can implement EN 18216 (identifier + carrier) and EN 18219 (resolver) on day one, then extend to EN 18221 (continuity) when their category enters its ESPR delegated-act deadline, and finally to full EN 18223 (structure) as their PIM catches up.
How DPP Agent maps against the suite
Every DPP served by DPP Agent implements the full suite by construction. Concretely:
- EN 18216 — every passport carries a GS1 Digital Link URI of the form
https://dpp.brand.com/01/{GTIN}/22/{CPV}/10/{BATCH}/21/{SERIAL}and every printed label carries a compliant Data Matrix or QR carrier at the correct print-error correction level. See the identifier deep-dive. - EN 18219 — the resolver at
api/v1/resolve.jsimplements the redirect, negotiation and error-handling rules the standard requires. Multi-locale content is served via language negotiation; audience-scoped content (consumer vs regulator vs recycler) via the section-audience system. See the resolver deep-dive. - EN 18221 — every DPP is written to the primary datastore and, at customer request, dual-written to a backup host of the customer's choice: dpp-backup.com, the customer's own storage, or Blippa Mongo. See the lifecycle deep-dive.
- EN 18223 — the passport is emitted as JSON-LD with the CIRPASS-2 vocabulary as the default and
?schema=cirpass-2as an explicit option. Structured cross-schema equivalence lets a reader that only knows one flavour still access the data. See the structure deep-dive.
The rest of this section walks each standard in the order it applies during a real product's life — assign the identifier, put it on the label, resolve the URL, deliver the content, keep it alive.
Where the suite is not the whole story
Three important adjacent standards do not sit inside JTC 24 but are referenced by it:
- GS1 Digital Link — the URL scheme EN 18216 mandates for consumer-facing addressing. GS1's specification is the authoritative source; EN 18216 references it rather than duplicating it.
- EN 18246 — a companion standard published in the same series covering conformance testing methodology. Use it if you are certifying a third-party solution against the JTC 24 suite.
- ISO/IEC 15459 — unique-identifier registration for non-GTIN carriers (VIN for vehicles, ISCC for chemicals, etc). Relevant when GTIN is not the natural product identifier.
Finally, ESPR itself and the category-specific delegated acts (batteries, textiles, iron and steel first) sit above the JTC 24 suite. They define what has to be disclosed. The JTC 24 standards define how it is technically encoded, addressed, resolved and preserved. The two layers are designed to evolve independently.