Chapter 6 — full chapter

6.2 Traceability: Unique IDs, the Digital Product Passport and Blockchain

Circularity begins with identification: a product that can state its own identity can be tracked, verified, resold, and sorted. This section covers the data carriers and identification standards that connect a physical garment to its digital record, and the platforms where that record is assembled before it reaches anyone. The direction is no longer speculative. In the Global Fashion Agenda's 2024 monitoring, 66% of surveyed companies reported value-chain transparency targets, a 39% increase on the previous year, and 62% of those reported progress against them, with the acceleration attributed to CSRD and CSDDD pressure and to the arrival of product passports (Global Fashion Agenda, GFA Monitor Update 2024, https://globalfashionagenda.org). For an SME, the entry point is item-level identification, not a platform.

6.2.1 Giving Products a Voice: QR, RFID, and Unique IDs

A label states a fact; a data carrier addresses a record. That is the whole difference, and it is what makes identification the precondition for everything else in this chapter: a fixed claim printed on a care label cannot be updated, verified, or read by a sorting machine, while a pointer to a record can be all three. The carrier itself is a choice between a printed QR code, cheap and readable by any phone but dependent on an intact surface, and RFID or NFC, more expensive but machine-readable in bulk and without line of sight, which is what makes it the carrier of choice where automated handling is involved.

What keeps these carriers from fragmenting into proprietary systems is the identification standard beneath them. GS1 Digital Link encodes the GTIN together with serial or batch data in a single 2D barcode, so the same symbol scans at the point of sale and resolves online to product information, certifications, and traceability records (GS1, https://www.gs1.org/standards/gs1-digital-link). It is the backbone of the retail migration to 2D barcodes, and its practical consequence is that a brand does not choose between a commercial barcode and a passport link. They are the same symbol.

6.2.2 Case example: H&M, RFID as infrastructure

H&M[11], operating over 5,000 stores, struggled with inventory accuracy: manual counts took weeks per store, and error rates ran at 15–25%. RFID tags applied to each garment at the manufacturing stage, read by fixed and handheld readers across warehouses and stores, raised inventory accuracy from about 75% to over 99% and cut counting time from weeks to hours. The I4.0 benefit is efficiency; the I5.0 significance is that the same item-level identification infrastructure is exactly what product passports, take-back schemes, and automated end-of-life sorting will require.

Figure 6.2, H&M's item-level RFID: tagging every garment lifted inventory accuracy toward real time across 5,000+ stores. (Source: H&M)

6.2.3 A Product That Carries Its Own Record: Blockchain and the DPP

The Digital Product Passport, established under the ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781), is a structured digital record accompanying a product through its lifecycle: precise material composition, chemicals of concern, origin and supply chain steps, care and repair information, and end-of-life options, accessible through the product's data carrier. Its systemic value is interoperability. The same verified data serves consumers making a purchase, authorities checking compliance against REACH or ecodesign thresholds, resellers authenticating an item and grading its condition, and recyclers sorting by verified composition (section 6.3).

The rules are not yet written. The ESPR is in force, but the obligations that will apply to textiles arrive through a delegated act, currently expected to be adopted around 2027 with application following after a transition period, so design decisions taken now will be governed by requirements that are still being specified. What exists already is the preparatory infrastructure. The EU-funded CIRPASS project produced the cross-sectoral DPP data model and product-identification requirements, together with sector roadmaps for textiles, electronics, and batteries, and continues as CIRPASS-2 with live pilots (https://cirpassproject.eu). For planning purposes the useful complement is DPP4All, an Austrian research report that sets out the data-exchange conditions and the legal and technical prerequisites a passport implementation actually has to satisfy, across textile, electronics, and battery use cases (Austrian BMK, St. Pölten UAS and Brainbows, 2023). For SMEs specifically, the Swedish Trace4Value programme, run with RISE, publishes a public DPP guide and documented cases including Filippa K, written for companies without a data department (https://trace4value.se).

The commercial layer is already operating ahead of the legislation. EON provides enterprise digital IDs, giving every item a cloud profile that accumulates lifecycle events from production through resale and recycling, deployed by H&M, Balenciaga, Zalando, and Chloé, and selected for the CIRPASS-2 DPP pilot (https://www.eon.xyz); Stella McCartney's implementation is among the most complete, with each garment carrying materials, manufacturing location, and certifications. Renoon reports more than ten million passport-ready products and over thirty live cases, and supplies the passport backbone behind Copenhagen Fashion Week's sustainability requirements (https://www.renoon.com). The practical reading for a design engineer is that the passport is no longer a research question but a procurement one.

6.2.4 Digital Traceability Platforms, Not Standards

The DPP does not require brands to build infrastructure, it requires them to connect to it. Traceability platforms centralize supplier data across tiers, fiber, spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, linking each production step to an item or batch. TrusTrace is representative of the category: it consolidates primary supplier data across all tiers for fashion, footwear, and textiles, uses it to map supply chains and manage due-diligence risk, and is built for volumes at which manual collection is not an option (https://trustrace.com). Circular-economy platforms such as Circular.fashion add design-for-recycling information to the same record. The division of labor is worth stating plainly: the passport is the customer-facing record, the platform is where the data is collected, cleaned, and verified before it gets there.

6.2.5 AI for Supplier Risk and Compliance Monitoring

AI on traceability data monitors what a spreadsheet cannot: anomaly detection flags inconsistencies between declared volumes, stated capacities, and order books; document verification checks certificates such as GOTS, OCS, and OEKO-TEX against issuer registers; ESG screening surfaces red flags before a supplier is onboarded. The output is a risk signal per supplier, which is the raw material for CSRD and CSDDD due-diligence reporting. Screening of this kind depends on knowing which facilities exist and who sources from them, which is the gap Open Supply Hub fills: a free, open database of production facilities worldwide, linking factories to the brands and suppliers that use them, usable both to locate sites in one's own chain and to check what else is known about them (https://opensupplyhub.org).

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