Chapter 3 — full chapter
Chapter 3 — full chapter
3.1 Data requirements
Framed at EU level, a DPP is best understood as a data infrastructure rather than a label. The European Parliament’s own research service describes it as a structured collection of product-related data, accessible throughout the value chain, built from three parts: a unique product identifier, a dataset of verified information, and an access point such as a QR code, RFID tag or digital twin. Chapter 2 mapped the roughly fifty data points a textile DPP is expected to carry within that structure, organised by legislative logic; product and producer identity, performance, and after-sale information. This section returns to the same data with a different question: not what a passport must say, but how a business turns a legal list of fields into a working dataset that can actually support traceability.
A field list on its own is not a traceability system. Two businesses can hold identical data points, the same fibre percentages, the same country of origin, the same care instructions, and still produce passports of very different quality, because what separates a usable record from a decorative one is not which fields are present but how reliably each one is captured, updated and trusted. This section works through that gap in four steps: what a data requirement actually consists of, how it connects to the physical carrier that will deliver it, how fields differ in urgency, and who is answerable for each one.