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Fashion and footwear brands need to prepare now if they are to have any hope of implementing digital product passports in time to comply with looming legislation, according to traceability platform TrusTrace. To help the industry get there, it has pulled together learnings from a trial of digital product passports (DPPs) into a new playbook.
“The introduction of digital product passports marks a fundamental shift in how the industry will need to work with product data and infrastructure — and are pivotal in the European Union getting the data insights needed to achieve net zero,” says TrusTrace co-founder and CEO Shameek Ghosh. “While the need for digital product passports is well understood, how to effectively prepare for them and implement them is not, and the lack of clarity can slow the industry and sustainable progress down, particularly if brands and retailers wait for the delegated acts to be finalised at the end of 2025 before they act,” says Ghosh.
The European Commission has ruled that, by 2030, all products sold in the EU will need to have a DPP, which tracks and shares information about who made the product and where, the materials used, its environmental footprint and chemical compliance, how the product should be cared for and its circularity potential. The final data and IT system requirements are expected to be decided by late 2025, after which, implementation will begin.
‘Unlocking DPP: The Why, What and How of Digital Product Passports’ is the third playbook TrusTrace has launched, following on from the first, which outlined why traceability is needed, and the second, which offered tools to map out methodologies and solutions for traceability. The latest playbook — launched today during the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen — is based on learnings from Trace4Value, an initiative participated in by TrusTrace that has been piloting the DPP system over the past two years on more than 3,000 products from two fashion brands: Kappahl and Marimekko.
During the trial, TrusTrace found that the key limitations were a lack of supply chain traceability, a lack of access to live data in the supply chain, and the potential for the data shared with consumers via QR codes to be at odds with disclosure requirements in markets outside the EU.
“The real challenge with the digital product passport is ensuring you have all the product data available, and the IT infrastructure to ensure interoperability [the ability of systems to connect and communicate] across all the places where the data sits,” says Ghosh. The playbook outlines three core components of the DPP: product data, unique identifiers (in the form of a QR code, barcode or numeric code, for instance) and the required interoperable IT system needed for decentralised data sharing.
If brands have begun implementing traceability at a product level, then the required data should be there, Ghosh says. However, brands that are still working at a basic level with traceability — using excel sheets and offline filing systems instead of advanced data systems — will struggle.
Preparing for the DPP is a multi-functional effort, Ghosh flags, and should not just be relegated to the sustainability or sourcing team. For brands that get the digital product passport right, there are benefits beyond compliance alone, including authentication, storytelling opportunities and taking a proactive stance to supply chain management.
“We see it as an opportunity to heighten the level of information and transparency we offer consumers about products, but also as an opportunity to manage product data more efficiently, with the product afterlife in mind,” says Nicolaj Reffstrup, co-founder of Ganni, a provider of insights for the playbook. “It’s easy to see the hurdles and uncertainties, but we should all be excited about the data shift that will happen in the coming years.”
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