Digital Product Passport Implementation — Research Documentation

Arte Taxco · Taxco de Alarcón, Guerrero, Mexico

Observation window documented: July 2026. Page frozen as evidence — the data below is not updated as the live system evolves. Only the citation block at the end of this page may be updated upon publication of the article.

This page provides supplementary documentation for the empirical illustration reported in a peer-reviewed article currently under review (citation below). It documents a live, voluntary Digital Product Passport (DPP) implementation in the artisanal silver jewelry sector: lifecycle data is recorded at the point of manufacture, attached to each individual piece as a certificate of origin, and maintained through resale under a first-party verification architecture. Jewelry is not currently within the product scope of the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR; Regulation (EU) 2024/1781); this implementation is therefore voluntary and unmandated, which is what makes it analytically useful as a case.

1. What is recorded, and when

Each new piece is registered at the moment it enters the catalogue. The record includes: a unique SKU, silver fineness (ley), weight in grams, piece type, photographs, and — where applicable — the workshop (taller) and artisan of origin. From this record the system generates (a) a certificate of origin with a public verification URL, which is created when the piece is registered and formally issued at the point of sale, following a mandatory physical verification of the metal fineness; and (b) machine-readable inventory events aligned with the GS1 EPCIS 2.0 standard and serialisable to it, so that each subsequent lifecycle step (publication, sale, re-entry for resale) is appended as an event rather than overwriting prior data.

2. Catalogue composition during the observation window

As reported in the article, during the observation window the catalogue comprised approximately 4,400 SKUs, of which roughly 2,700 are own-catalogue pieces carrying a structured provenance record, and roughly 1,400 are historical listings migrated with thin, largely unverifiable metadata. This split is analytically deliberate: the historical listings function as an internal comparison group for the completeness of passport data.

The event layer was introduced progressively and covers a subset of the registered pieces; the breakdown above shows this precisely rather than by approximation. The two rows without an observation-window figure are reported as n/a because that state was not measured at the time and is not reconstructed retrospectively here. Observation-window figures are storefront counts as reported in the article; the snapshot column reports the system of record on the date shown. The two columns are deliberately distinct and are not intended to be compared as a time series.

3. Certificate of origin — real example (buyer data redacted)

The following is a real certificate record produced by the system for a piece registered during the observation window. Consistent with the process described in §1, the certificate is created at registration and remains in DRAFT state until the piece is sold and its fineness physically verified, at which point it is formally issued. All buyer-identifying data has been removed and is shown as [REDACTED].

Certificate folio

AT-2606-9430930981110-0

SKU

ATA-RIN-000002977

Piece type

Ring

Silver fineness

.925

Weight

4.5 g

Workshop / artisan

Arte Taxco (in-house)

Record created

2026-06-24

Certificate state

DRAFT — issued upon sale, after physical verification

Public verification URL

https://certificados.artetaxco.mx/certificado/AT-2606-9430930981110-0

Buyer

[REDACTED]

4. EPCIS 2.0 event sample — the same piece

The machine-readable lifecycle record of the piece above, serialised from the system’s internal event model into GS1 EPCIS 2.0 form. Structure, timestamps, event types and weights are verbatim from production. Personal data is redacted: the given name of the staff member who recorded each event, and the personal-name component of internal custody location identifiers (shown as [REDACTED]_custodia, where the role suffix is retained because the custody transfer is what the event documents).

{
  "@context": "https://ref.gs1.org/standards/epcis/2.0.0/",
  "type": "EPCISDocument",
  "schemaVersion": "2.0",
  "creationDate": "2026-07-19T15:19:05.551Z",
  "epcisBody": {
    "eventList": [
      {
        "type": "ObjectEvent",
        "eventTime": "2026-06-23T15:58:04.792Z",
        "eventTimeZoneOffset": "-06:00",
        "action": "OBSERVE",
        "bizStep": "commissioning",
        "epcList": [
          "urn:arte-taxco:sku:ATA-RIN-000002977"
        ],
        "readPoint": {
          "id": "almacen_principal"
        },
        "bizLocation": {
          "id": "[REDACTED]_custodia"
        },
        "arteTaxco:eventoTipo": "COMISIONADO",
        "arteTaxco:pesoEntradaG": 252.1,
        "arteTaxco:pesoSalidaG": null,
        "arteTaxco:registradoPor": "[REDACTED]",
        "arteTaxco:notas": "[REDACTED]"
      },
      {
        "type": "ObjectEvent",
        "eventTime": "2026-06-24T16:02:44.510Z",
        "eventTimeZoneOffset": "-06:00",
        "action": "ADD",
        "bizStep": "commissioning",
        "epcList": [
          "urn:arte-taxco:sku:ATA-RIN-000002977"
        ],
        "readPoint": {
          "id": "[REDACTED]_custodia"
        },
        "bizLocation": {
          "id": "[REDACTED]_custodia"
        },
        "arteTaxco:eventoTipo": "CAPTURADO",
        "arteTaxco:pesoEntradaG": 4.5,
        "arteTaxco:pesoSalidaG": null,
        "arteTaxco:registradoPor": "[REDACTED]",
        "arteTaxco:notas": "[REDACTED]"
      },
      {
        "type": "ObjectEvent",
        "eventTime": "2026-06-24T16:02:44.510Z",
        "eventTimeZoneOffset": "-06:00",
        "action": "OBSERVE",
        "bizStep": "storing",
        "epcList": [
          "urn:arte-taxco:sku:ATA-RIN-000002977"
        ],
        "readPoint": {
          "id": "[REDACTED]_custodia"
        },
        "bizLocation": {
          "id": "shopify_publicado"
        },
        "arteTaxco:eventoTipo": "PUBLICADO",
        "arteTaxco:pesoEntradaG": 4.5,
        "arteTaxco:pesoSalidaG": null,
        "arteTaxco:registradoPor": "Sistema",
        "arteTaxco:notas": "[REDACTED]"
      }
    ]
  }
}

5. Physical verification at the transfer (Circular channel)

The resale channel performs physical verification when a piece changes hands, never while it sits idle. What a piece’s passport already documents changes only how its certificate is treated on resale — not the timing of verification. Once a buyer commits, the piece travels to the platform, is physically verified, and is dispatched only if it passes; if it fails, the buyer is refunded in full. A piece the platform originally certified is re-verified against its existing certificate and receives a new certificate explicitly linked to the previous one. A piece with no prior Arte Taxco certificate — typically acquired from a third party — is verified for silver authenticity and receives a new certificate with no prior lineage; attributes the platform cannot verify, such as workshop or maker, are recorded as “not documented” rather than asserted. In neither case does a piece reach a buyer without passing through the platform’s physical verification at the transfer, and each resale is appended to the piece’s event history.

Between transfers, every certified piece remains listed with an anonymised ownership record and can receive purchase offers routed to its current owner, who is never obliged to sell. The passport thus functions simultaneously as certificate, ownership registry, and resale venue.

6. Scope and honesty of this documentation

This page documents a single, ongoing, non-experimental implementation by a micro/small enterprise. It is published as supplementary documentation of an illustration, not as validation of any general claim. The observation-window figures above are the ones reported in the article; the snapshot column shows the system state on the day this page was created, after which the page is intentionally frozen.

Citation

Manuscript under review at the Journal of Innovation Economics & Management: “Data Governance as Institutional Innovation: Digital Product Passports and the Informational Foundations of Circular Markets.”