Digital Product Passports for Circular Supply Chains
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TEXTILE PILOT SNAPSHOT
Figure 2-1: Data-completeness ramp over the pilot window.
The textile program followed two anonymized brands, one mass-market apparel retailer and one premium label, over a twelve-month window in a Trace4Value-style consortium arrangement alongside a GS1 member organisation and a national standards body [ 6 ]. Scope was apparel across roughly 500 SKUs in cotton, polyester, and recycled blends.
The data model combined GS1 Digital Link identifiers with EPCIS 2.0 event capture, mapped onto the 125 textile-specific data points converged in the Trace4Value pilot [ 6 ]. The identifier carrier was a printed QR code applied at the production stage, with a consumer-facing layer exposing roughly 25 – 30 of the data points at point of scan: material composition, country of manufacture, care and certification claims.
Three outcomes are reported. First, consumer-facing depth: about 28 data points per SKU were resolvable at scan. Second, onboarding: bringing a typical Tier-2 finisher or dyer onto the data protocol took materially longer than its battery equivalent, because many textile sub-suppliers operate without in-house IT and submitted data via assisted web forms rather than system-tosystem integration( Figure 2-2). Third, methodology-dependent fields: objective fields( composition, origin, certificates) populated readily, but methodology-dependent fields such as product carbon footprint could not be published consistently until a shared calculation method was agreed.
The textile programme’ s distinctive gap differs from battery’ s: carrier-to-credential bridging at the retail and return point. A QR code resolves to a public consumer view but linking that scan to a verifiable credential at resale, repair, or return where the DPP’ s circular-economy value is realized had no standardized pattern, leaving the most circular moments of the product’ s life the least machine-verifiable.
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