The RAIN Alliance, the non-profit industry body behind the push to standardise and promote UHF RFID under the RAIN name, said on 28 October 2026 that it has been accepted as a liaison organisation to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 5, the committee writing international standards for the Digital Product Passport (DPP). The seat gives the Alliance a formal route into the drafting work, and a better chance that RAIN tags stay on the accepted list of data carriers as the passport idea spreads beyond Europe.
A liaison is not a voting member, and the difference is worth being precise about. ISO’s own guidance on committee membership states that liaison representatives may attend meetings and receive committee documents but do not vote: the ballots that turn a draft into an International Standard belong to the participating national standards bodies. What a liaison gains is standing, early sight of working drafts and the right to submit technical contributions. Admission is itself decided by the committee’s members, which is the point Aileen Ryan, president and chief executive of the RAIN Alliance, was making when she said the Alliance was accepted “with such significant support from voting members”.
What ISO/IEC JTC 5 actually is
JTC 5 is new. DIN, the German national standards institute, and DKE, the German commission for electrical, electronic and information technologies, launched it on 20 April 2026, with DIN holding the secretariat and coordinating the international expert panel. ISO’s committee register lists Adrian von Muehlenen as chair to the end of 2031. Between them, ISO and IEC have more than 170 national standards bodies as members, which is the reach the committee is drawing on.
Its remit is the framework rather than the detail: cross-sectoral and cross-system interoperability for the DPP system and the wider DPP ecosystem. It does not write sector-specific standards, which stay with the existing ISO and IEC technical committees covering each product area. The first work item is ISO/AWI 25534-1, “Digital product passport. Part 1: Overview and fundamental principles”, a terminology and governance document assigned to JTC 5 following an ISO Technical Management Board resolution in 2026. CEN and CENELEC, the European standards organisations, reported that the inaugural plenary was to be held in Berlin in September 2026 with experts from 48 countries. In the United States, ANSI has accredited INCITS, the information technology standards committee, as administrator of the US technical advisory group to JTC 5, which held its organising meeting on 9 July 2026.
The European groundwork JTC 24 has already laid
JTC 5 is not starting from a blank page. CEN and CENELEC’s joint technical committee 24 has spent the past two years turning the system-level requirements of EU law into technical specifications under the European Commission’s standardisation request M/604. Six horizontal European standards came out of that work and were presented publicly on 25 June 2026:
- EN 18216:2026, data exchange protocols and machine-readable formats
- EN 18219:2026, unique identifiers for products, economic operators and facilities
- EN 18220:2026, data carrier requirements
- EN 18221:2026, data storage, archiving and persistence
- EN 18222:2026, APIs and passport lifecycle management
- EN 18223:2026, system interoperability
Two further security standards, prEN 18239 on access rights, information system security and business confidentiality, and prEN 18246 on data authentication, reliability and integrity, went to formal vote with a closing date of 16 July 2026 and were reported as published in late October 2026.
All of these are deliberately product-agnostic. They define how a passport is identified, carried, resolved, exchanged, stored and interpreted, not what any given product must disclose. That stays with the delegated acts for each product group. They are also voluntary for the moment. Only once a European standard is cited as a harmonised standard in the Official Journal of the European Union does applying it give a presumption of conformity with the corresponding legal requirements, and that citation had not happened for the EN 182xx family as of October 2026.
EN 18220 and the carrier question
EN 18220:2026, “Digital Product Passport. Data Carrier Requirements”, is the standard the RAIN Alliance keeps pointing at, and reasonably so. It governs the physical-to-digital link itself: optical 2D codes, RFID tags and NFC chips, along with encoding, error correction, read quality, durability, carrier placement and the recognition indicator that marks a carrier as a DPP carrier. Architecture, secure elements and cryptography sit outside its scope and are handled elsewhere in the family. RAIN RFID, meaning passive UHF tags running the ISO/IEC 18000-63 air interface protocol that GS1 also publishes as UHF Gen2, is one of the carriers the standard accepts. The RAIN Alliance is a liaison to JTC 24 as well as to JTC 5.
Acceptance is not the same as parity. The practical constraint reported from the standard’s drafting is that at least one carrier on a product must be readable by an ordinary smartphone with no dedicated app, which today means a QR code or a Data Matrix in nearly every case. GS1’s own provisional DPP work pushes in the same direction, specifying a 2D code carrying a GS1 Digital Link URI and treating RFID and NFC as additions to that code rather than substitutes for it. Neither the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation nor EN 18219 mandates GS1 identifiers specifically, but the gravity of the installed base pulls hard towards printed codes.
That is why a carrier-neutral framework is worth arguing for rather than assuming. A QR code costs nothing to print and anyone with a phone can read it, but it has to be found and aimed at, it degrades with wear, and it cannot be read in bulk. A RAIN tag can be read through packaging, at a distance of a few metres, hundreds of items at a time, which is the difference between scanning a pallet and scanning a shipment, and it survives handling that destroys a printed label. If end-of-life sorting, bulk returns processing or automated recycling lines are meant to use the passport at all, something other than a hand-aimed camera needs to be able to read it. For the underlying terminology, air interface protocols and frequency bands, see the RFID News glossary.
The deadlines doing the work
Two pieces of EU law are driving all of this, and both run through our Digital Product Passport coverage. The EU Battery Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, requires a battery passport for in-scope batteries placed on the market or put into service from 18 February 2027, covering electric vehicle batteries, light means of transport batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh, with access by QR code. Related due diligence obligations were pushed back to 18 August 2027 by Regulation (EU) 2025/1561.
The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, is the broader instrument. Its 2025 to 2030 working plan names the first priority product groups: steel and aluminium, textiles with a focus on apparel, furniture, tyres and mattresses, alongside several energy-related product groups. Each group gets its own delegated act setting the ecodesign and information requirements, including what the passport has to contain. The textiles act was expected in 2027 as of October 2026, with application following around 2028, and industry commentary generally assumes something like 18 months between a delegated act’s publication and the compliance date. Those dates have slipped before.
The smartphone claim, checked
Susanne Guth-Orlowski, the Alliance’s DPP specialist, argues in the announcement that “with RAIN reader capability soon to be available in smartphones, RAIN adoption will become accessible and affordable to consumers”. The standards work and the products are different things. The Alliance launched an initiative on 26 March 2025 to standardise RAIN reader integration into mass-market smartphones, with workgroups on use cases, on hardware integration, and a separate SG15 group handling the operating system layer: a standard OS-level API, an open-source Android reference application and an interoperable SDK, so apps are not tied to one chipset. On the silicon side, Qualcomm announced the Dragonwing Q-6690 in 2025 as an enterprise mobile processor with UHF RFID integrated on the chip, and Zebra launched an enterprise Android handset with built-in tag reading in January 2025.
What does not exist, as of October 2026, is a mass-market consumer phone with a RAIN reader built in. Bluetooth sled, case and dongle readers have been on sale for years, but they are accessories rather than integration, and the Alliance’s own description of its smartphone work treats privacy and security as questions still being worked through. “Soon” is the Alliance’s word, not a shipping date.
What the seat changes
Nothing immediately. A liaison seat is a place at the table during drafting, and JTC 5’s first deliverable is a vocabulary and principles document rather than anything a manufacturer must implement. The value is defensive and long-term. Europe’s EN 182xx family already names RFID among the accepted carriers, and the Alliance, which says it unites more than 200 member organisations as of October 2026, wants the international layer built on top of that work not to narrow quietly to optical codes while nobody from the RFID industry is in the room.
Whether any of it translates into RAIN tags on products is a commercial question the standards cannot settle. A UHF inlay in a garment or a tyre costs more than printing a code on the label, and the ESPR delegated acts will not instruct anyone to fit one. What the standards can do is keep the choice available, and readable, in every market that adopts a passport.
