28/05/2026
A Digital Product Passport could decide whether a garment gets a second life or ends up in landfill.
Last week, our founder Chathura Sudharshan joined a brilliant panel hosted by CDI COLLECTIVE. CIC with Tamily Cookson and Nottingham Trent University, alongside Jen Bell, Berni Raeside-Bell, FCIM, and Erica Horne.
One question stayed with us afterwards:
Everyone celebrates the front end of fashion innovation virtual try-ons, smarter design tools, shiny new DPPs.
But what about the billions of garments that already exist?
The pieces sitting in wardrobes, storage facilities, resale piles, and warehouses moving towards landfill faster than we can recycle them.
That’s where a properly structured Digital Product Passport actually proves its value.
Used as a compliance checkbox, a DPP is just a label with a link.
Built properly, it becomes a living product record that travels with a garment throughout its lifecycle:
fibre composition, origin, care instructions, repair history, resale data, recycling pathways.
And that data is what makes circularity possible at scale:
→ AI sorting systems can identify fibre blends in milliseconds
→ resale and community swap platforms can authenticate and value unlabelled garments
→ recyclers can route textiles into fibre to fibre recovery instead of downcycling
Circularity rarely fails because of a lack of ambition.
It fails because of a lack of usable data.
The passport is the data.
One product. One record. Every stage of the journey.
What would change if every garment you owned could tell you exactly what it’s made from and what should happen to it next?