Why safety equipment needs Digital Product Passports — and why no one has built them until now

Batteries got passports first. Safety equipment is still waiting.

The EU's Digital Product Passport regulation (ESPR 2024/1781) starts with batteries. February 18, 2027: every industrial and EV battery placed on the EU market needs a machine-readable digital passport containing its chemistry, carbon footprint, and State of Health data. Construction products follow. Textiles are next.

The logic is sound. Regulators want to know what products are made of, where they came from, and how to recycle them. The goal is a circular economy with traceable materials.

But there is a category of products where traceability is not an environmental ambition — it is a safety requirement. And that category has been overlooked by every DPP platform built so far.

Safety equipment.

The traceability gap in safety equipment

A fall arrest harness is not a battery. Nobody tracks its carbon footprint. But someone's life depends on knowing: when was this harness last inspected? Did it pass? Has it been exposed to chemicals? Has it exceeded its service life? Is the person wearing it trained on its use?

Today, that information lives in paper logbooks, Excel files, and filing cabinets. When equipment moves between sites, the records often do not follow. When a harness is retired, the reason is rarely documented in a way that reaches the next owner — or the recycler.

This is not a theoretical problem. Port State Control inspectors detain vessels over missing lifting gear certificates. Construction site auditors flag expired PPE. Incident investigations stall because nobody can produce the inspection history for the equipment involved.

The data exists somewhere. It is just not attached to the product.

Why no one has built this

The DPP platforms that exist today — iPoint, Spherity, Circulor, R-Cycle — were built for a specific regulatory trigger: the EU Battery Regulation and the ESPR. They focus on material composition, environmental declarations, and supply chain traceability. Their data models assume you are a manufacturer declaring what a product is made of at the point of production.

Safety equipment does not fit that model. A harness DPP is not useful at the point of manufacture. It becomes useful after the first inspection. After the tenth. After the equipment is retired and someone needs to know why.

The other category of competitors — asset management and inspection platforms like SafetyCulture, UpKeep, Limble, and Fiix — track inspections well. But they are internal tools. The data stays inside the organization. There is no public-facing, scannable passport that a regulator, new owner, or recycler can access by tapping a tag on the equipment itself.

And then there is Petzl. Petzl deserves credit for being the most digitally advanced PPE manufacturer in the world. Their products carry serial numbers. Their ePPEcentre platform lets customers register equipment and log inspections digitally. But Petzl's system is a closed, brand-specific management tool — not an open, standards-compliant Digital Product Passport. You cannot scan a Petzl harness and see a GS1-identified, JSON-LD-structured passport that any system can read. The data is locked inside Petzl's ecosystem.

That is the gap. Nobody has connected inspection-driven lifecycle data to a publicly verifiable, standards-compliant digital passport for safety equipment.

What a safety equipment DPP contains

A Digital Product Passport for a fall arrest harness, chain sling, or shackle is different from a battery passport. The data that matters is not material composition (though that is included). It is operational history:

• Product identity: Manufacturer, model, serial number, GS1 GTIN, date of manufacture, rated capacity or SWL
• Certification: CE marking, EN 361/EN 818/EN 13414 compliance, Declaration of Conformity, notified body
• Inspection history: Every inspection event — date, result, inspector name, method, findings, photo evidence — signed and timestamped
• Condition status: Current status (compliant, due for inspection, quarantined, retired) updated automatically from inspection data
• Lifecycle events: Commissioning, site transfers, repairs, modifications, incidents, decommissioning — each logged as a structured event
• End-of-life: Reason for retirement (wear, damage, age, incident), disposal method, material composition for recycling

The critical difference: inspection history is not static manufacturer data. It is generated in the field, by the people who use and inspect the equipment, over months and years. A DPP platform that does not integrate with the inspection workflow cannot generate this data. It can only accept what someone manually enters.

How KALIRA builds DPPs from inspections

KALIRA is an asset management and inspection platform. Engineers already use it to scan NFC tags on equipment, run inspection checklists, and generate compliance certificates. The inspection workflow is the core product.

The DPP is a layer on top of that workflow. When an inspector scans a harness, runs the checklist, and records a pass — KALIRA automatically writes that event into the asset's Digital Product Passport as a signed lifecycle event. No extra steps. No separate data entry. The passport builds itself from the work inspectors already do.

The technical implementation:

• GS1 Digital Link URI as the canonical identifier, encoded in NFC tags and QR codes
• JSON-LD structured data following the EU DPP schema, extensible per product category
• Cryptographic signing of lifecycle events — each inspection result is signed and timestamped, making the record tamper-evident
• Public verification page — anyone can scan the tag and see the passport without an account or app download
• ESPR-compliant data carrier — the NFC tag or QR code on the physical equipment links directly to the passport

This is not a retrofit. The architecture was designed from the start to turn operational inspection data into standards-compliant passport records.

Why this matters now

The ESPR does not currently mandate DPPs for safety equipment. Batteries are first. Construction products are next. PPE and lifting gear may be years away from a formal EU requirement.

But the market does not wait for mandates. Port State Control authorities already expect digital records for lifting gear under SOLAS. Major EPC contractors already require digital inspection evidence from subcontractors. Insurance companies are beginning to differentiate premiums based on the quality of maintenance records.

The organizations that adopt DPPs for safety equipment now are not doing it because a regulation forced them. They are doing it because it solves a real problem: proving that a piece of equipment is safe to use, with verifiable evidence, accessible to anyone who needs to see it.

See it working

KALIRA's safety equipment DPP is live today. You can see a working example at kaliratech.com/demo — scan a sample NFC tag or QR code and view the full passport for a fall arrest harness, including inspection history, certification data, and lifecycle events.

No account required. No app download. That is the point.

Start generating Digital Product Passports for your safety equipment. Free to start.