RAIN Alliance announced on 28 October 2026 that it has been accepted as a liaison to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 5, the committee writing international standards for the Digital Product Passport. The Alliance is the non-profit trade body for RAIN RFID, the passive ultra high frequency technology standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63 and also known as GS1 UHF Gen2, which reads tags at several metres without line of sight and reads many at once. A Digital Product Passport, or DPP, is a machine-readable record attached to a product that links a globally unique identifier to verified information about its materials, environmental impact, supply chain, repairability and end-of-life options.
What a liaison is, and what it is not
Liaison status is a real seat at the table, and the word is doing enough work here to be worth unpacking. Under the ISO/IEC Directives Part 1, a category A liaison organisation may propose new work items, nominate experts to working groups and hold convenor or project leader roles in them. ISO’s own guidance for committee liaisons is blunt about the limit: “A-liaisons do not have voting rights. However, they can submit comments during the voting process and are strongly encouraged to do so.” Those comments get the same treatment as comments from member bodies, which is the part that matters in practice.
Getting in is not automatic either. The committee must pass a resolution, at a meeting or by ballot, with a two-thirds majority of participating members voting to approve. That is the mechanism behind Aileen Ryan’s reference to support from voting members. Ryan, named RAIN Alliance President and CEO in October 2022, said in the announcement:
“The Digital Product Passport is reshaping the global economy by prioritizing transparency, sustainability and efficient recycling throughout the entire lifecycle of a product. This level of global interoperability can only be achieved through cross-industry collaboration, and so we were honored to be accepted as a Liaison to ISO/IEC JTC 5 with such significant support from voting members. Our acceptance underscores our commitment to supporting organizations in their use of RAIN tags to optimize recycling, reuse, and resale – and in turn promote a truly circular economy.”
The announcement does not say which category the Alliance holds. It already has an equivalent position at CEN/CENELEC JTC 24, accepted in early 2025.
Why there are two DPP committees
CEN/CLC/JTC 24, “Digital Product Passport – Framework and System”, is the European committee, created to answer the European Commission’s standardisation request M/604 in support of the DPP provisions of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. CEN and CENELEC are the European bodies for general and electrotechnical standards respectively, and JTC 24’s secretariat is held by DIN, the German national standards body.
ISO/IEC JTC 5 is the international counterpart, described by CEN-CENELEC as the international mirror committee to JTC 24. DIN and DKE, the German electrotechnical commission, announced its launch on 20 April 2026, and DIN holds this secretariat too. ISO’s committee listing names Adrian von Muehlenen as chair until the end of 2031, with 32 participating and 16 observing national members. Its scope covers the DPP system framework and the wider DPP ecosystem rather than sector-specific standards, which stay with existing ISO and IEC committees. Work was to begin in the third quarter of 2026, with first results expected from 2028 and the inaugural plenary scheduled for Berlin in September 2026.
JTC 5 is built as a network rather than a silo, stitching together work that already exists elsewhere: ISO/TC 154, which covers data elements and documents used in commerce and industry, established an internal liaison with it on 9 August 2026.
Where RAIN already stands as an approved carrier
JTC 24 has produced eight European standards for the DPP, covering data exchange protocols (EN 18216), unique identifiers (EN 18219), data carriers (EN 18220), data storage and persistence (EN 18221), APIs (EN 18222), system interoperability (EN 18223), access rights and information security (EN 18239) and data authentication and integrity (EN 18246). Six were cited in the Official Journal by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736, adopted on 14 July 2026, which gives a presumption of conformity with Articles 10 and 11 of the ESPR for the parts they cover. EN 18239 and EN 18246, the security and authentication pair, were not among the six.
EN 18220:2026 was published in May 2026 and listed by CEN-CENELEC as “Digital product passport – Data carriers”. It sets requirements for the physical-to-digital link across optical 2D codes, RFID tags and NFC chips, covering symbology, format, error correction, encoding methods, print and production quality, and durability. The Alliance’s claim that RAIN RFID is one of the approved carriers is sound, and the limit matters: being in the standard is permission, not procurement. Which carrier a product must actually bear is set in the delegated act for its product group, so inclusion in EN 18220 guarantees a tag vendor nothing commercially on its own.
The drafting drew pointed industry comment on the RFID side. In a letter dated 5 September 2025 to the JTC 24 secretariat at DIN, AIM Global and AIM Europe argued that rewritable RFID and NFC carriers create a data integrity risk if a passport link can be overwritten, and recommended that write protection be made mandatory.
The regulatory clock
The ESPR is Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, which entered into force on 18 July 2024 and repealed the old Ecodesign Directive 2009/125/EC. It creates the DPP as a legal instrument but imposes nothing by itself. Obligations arrive product group by product group through delegated acts, and the Commission’s first Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Working Plan, adopted on 16 April 2025, set the running order: textiles with a focus on apparel, furniture, tyres, mattresses, iron and steel, and aluminium. The years in that plan are indicative targets for adopting delegated acts, not compliance dates.
The one hard date on the board is not an ESPR date at all. Under Article 77 of the EU Battery Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, electric vehicle batteries, light means of transport batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh placed on the EU market from 18 February 2027 must carry a battery passport. That is the first mandatory product passport in EU law, and the deployment that will show whether the plumbing works before the ESPR groups arrive.
The technical case, and the cost problem
The argument for a tag over a printed code at end of life is a good one and does not need overselling. A RAIN tag can be read in bulk, through packaging and through contamination, without being presented to a scanner. That is exactly the situation at a sorting facility or a textile recycler, where nobody will orient a filthy label towards a camera. Tags can also be built to survive repeated industrial laundering, or moulded into a tyre and still return an identifier years later. Susanne Guth-Orlowski, RAIN Alliance DPP Specialist, made the durability point in the announcement:
“Billions of products already rely on RAIN technology to deliver enhanced operations and support data-led decision-making across sectors including aviation, automotive, healthcare, retail, logistics and countless more. Each of these sectors benefit from the durable longevity RAIN tags provide as they can withstand heavy usage and harsh conditions while consistently delivering reliable data tracking throughout a product’s entire lifecycle. Furthermore, with RAIN reader capability soon to be available in smartphones, RAIN adoption will become accessible and affordable to consumers. This makes RAIN technology scalable to meet the needs of a global Digital Product Passport while bridging the gap between industry application and universal adoption.”
Against that sits an awkward economic fact. A QR code conforming to ISO/IEC 18004 costs effectively nothing to apply, because it is ink on a label that was being printed anyway. A tag is a chip, an antenna, an inlay, a conversion step and a verification step, and on a low-margin garment that difference is the whole argument. The groups where a tag’s economics already work, tyres, furniture, mattresses and industrial batteries, sit high up the working plan, while apparel at volume remains the hard case. Nor is this a market immune to cost pressure: RAIN Alliance reported on 2 April 2026 that four of its leading members shipped 42.7 billion RAIN tag chips in 2025, down from the record 52.8 billion of 2024. The realistic outcome for most product groups is both carriers, a 2D code for the consumer and a tag where automation or end-of-life recovery pays for it.
The smartphone question needs care
The claim that RAIN reader capability is “soon to be available in smartphones” is the most load-bearing line in the announcement, and it deserves stating precisely. As of October 2026 there is no shipping consumer handset with a built-in RAIN reader, and no handset maker has announced one with a date.
What exists is a path. RAIN Alliance published a joint position with Qualcomm, Impinj and Decathlon on 27 August 2024 setting out the case for RAIN readers in handsets, in which Qualcomm said initial rollouts would focus on enterprise devices with consumer devices to follow, giving no consumer date. In November 2025 Qualcomm’s Dragonwing Q-6690 was presented as the first enterprise mobile processor with a fully integrated UHF RAIN reader, supporting ISO/IEC 18000-63 and aimed at handhelds, tablets and payment terminals rather than consumer phones. Enterprise handsets with built-in UHF reading are already on sale: Zebra’s EM45, launched in January 2025, reads up to 20 UHF tags per second at a maximum range of 1.2 m, which is a useful instrument for a shop assistant and a long way from a shopper scanning a jumper in a changing room. Enterprise integration is real and shipping. Consumer integration is intended and unscheduled, and anyone building a DPP programme on the assumption that shoppers will read tags with their own phones is planning against a capability that does not yet exist.
What to watch next
Three things will show whether this liaison matters. Whether EN 18239 and EN 18246 get cited in the Official Journal, because without the security and authentication layer the data model is incomplete and the write protection question AIM raised stays open. What JTC 5 puts on its work programme once the Berlin plenary has settled its structure, with first deliverables not expected before 2028. And, most consequential for tag makers, whether the delegated acts for iron and steel, textiles and tyres name specific carriers or leave the choice to industry. That is where approval in a standard turns into orders, or does not.
