Digital Product Passports for fashion and product

We have been testing and implementing Digital Product Passports to the current standards 

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Digital Product Passports: Beyond Compliance

Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are emerging as an important part of the transition towards more transparent and circular products. They create a structured digital record of a product — bringing together information about materials, provenance, manufacturing, environmental performance, care, repair and end-of-life pathways.

But compliance is only the beginning.

The real opportunity is to use Digital Product Passports to create better connections between products, businesses, supply chains, customers and the wider circular economy.

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What is a Digital Product Passport?

A Digital Product Passport is a digital record connected to a physical product, designed to make trusted product information accessible throughout its lifecycle.

Within the European Union, DPPs form part of the wider move towards more sustainable products under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). The exact information required will vary between product categories as requirements continue to develop.

For fashion and textiles, this could include information such as fibre composition, manufacturing origins, environmental information, care instructions and data that supports repair, reuse, resale and recycling.

For businesses, however, preparing for DPPs means looking much further upstream than the final digital passport.

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Digital Product Passports start with the supply chain

A passport is only as useful as the information behind it.

Businesses need to understand where products and materials originate, who has handled them, what processes they have undergone and how that information can be verified.

Shorter and more transparent supply chains can make this considerably easier. Complex global supply chains, however, may require businesses to connect information held across multiple suppliers, manufacturers, certification systems and technology platforms.

This makes DPP implementation as much an organisational and ecosystem challenge as a technological one.

The question is not simply:

Can we collect the data?

It is also:

Can everyone within the system realistically participate in providing it?

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Creating equitable pathways to compliance

This is one of the less discussed challenges surrounding Digital Product Passports.

Brands understandably need credible, verifiable information before making claims about products and materials. But verification and certification can be expensive and administratively complex.

For smaller producers — particularly smallholder farmers, craftspeople and distributed manufacturing communities — those requirements can become a barrier to participating in premium global markets.

This creates a potential contradiction.

Some of the world's most regenerative or traditionally low-impact production systems may struggle to demonstrate their value digitally because they do not have access to the infrastructure required to prove it.

Good DPP implementation therefore needs to consider ethical compliance pathways alongside technical compliance.

Community-based verification, national standards, internationally recognised certification and new digital traceability systems may all have a role to play in creating credible evidence without automatically excluding smaller participants.

The goal should be to increase trust and transparency without creating another system in which only organisations with the greatest resources can participate.

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DPPs and the future of AI-powered commerce

There is another opportunity developing alongside regulation.

Digital Product Passports require businesses to create increasingly structured product information. When that information is also structured appropriately across websites and digital systems, it can help products become easier for machines as well as people to understand.

This matters as product discovery begins to move beyond conventional search engines and ecommerce filters towards AI search, Large Language Models (LLMs), shopping assistants and other forms of AI-powered commerce.

Structured product information can help these systems understand characteristics such as:

• what a product is made from

• where materials originate

• how and where it was manufactured

• certifications and verification

• how it should be cared for

• whether it can be repaired or resold

• what should happen to it at the end of its useful life

DPP readiness can therefore become more than a regulatory exercise. It can contribute to the digital discoverability and interoperability of products within emerging commerce ecosystems.

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Designing DPPs for circularity

Perhaps the biggest opportunity is what happens after a product has been sold.

A genuinely useful Digital Product Passport can provide information to different participants throughout the product's life.

A customer might access care and repair information. A resale platform could understand provenance and product characteristics. A repairer could identify components or materials. A recycler could access information needed to determine the appropriate recovery pathway.

This is where Digital Product Passports begin to support the infrastructure of a circular economy.

Rather than simply documenting a product's past, they can help enable its future.

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From digital compliance to connected systems

Digital Product Passports should not simply become another compliance layer added to existing products.

Implemented thoughtfully, they can provide infrastructure connecting traceability, transparency, circular business models, AI-powered discovery, resale, repair, recycling and regenerative supply chains.

That requires businesses to think beyond the passport itself.

What data needs to exist? Who creates it? Who verifies it? Who needs access to it? How will smaller supply-chain partners participate? And how can that information continue creating value throughout the life of the product?

These are not purely technology questions.

They are questions of business models, supply-chain relationships, collaboration and system design.

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At Circular Earth, we see Digital Product Passports as part of a much wider transition towards connected circular business.

Compliance may be the catalyst.

But the real opportunity is using better information to build product systems that are more transparent, more equitable and ultimately more regenerative.

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