Digital Product Passports & Circular Economy for Textiles
Our DPP dapp, designed specifically for the textile industry, facilitates the creation of Digital Product Passports in line with EU standards. It enables the registration and tracking of textiles throughout their lifecycle, aiming to elevate traceability and transparency across global supply chains.
“Textiles are the fabric of everyday life — in clothes and furniture, medical and protective equipment, buildings and vehicles. However, urgent action is needed as their impact on the environment continues to grow. EU consumption of textiles has, on average, the fourth highest impact on the environment and climate change, after food, housing and mobility. It is also the third highest area of consumption for water and land use, and fifth highest for the use of primary raw materials and greenhouse gas emissions.”
The passage above from the European Commission’s website perfectly summarizes the importance of improving the ways in which we produce and consume textile products. The issue is so important that the European Commission has outlined a “strategy for more sustainable and circular textiles”, which aims to raise the standard for all products sold in the EU by 2030. The objectives of the strategy are to implement a circular economy while also improving the durability, repairability, and sustainability of textiles.
What is a ‘Circular Economy’?
A circular economy is a closed loop system wherein the focus is on eliminating waste by reusing, recycling and repairing resources. When all of these individual systems are considered together, it is often referred to as ‘the circular economy’.
Building a circular economy for textiles is a complex undertaking which requires many steps from production to consumption to recycling and back to production. The key component in the process is an effective validation and tracking system for every product that is manufactured. This allows products to be certified when they meet sustainability standards, and also allows for effective tracking of the number of products being returned and/or recycled in order to be turned into new consumer products.
Why RBN is the solution?
Blockchain technology is excellent for tracking and record keeping in an environment where all parties require transparency and data integrity is of paramount importance. In a circular textile economy, there are various stakeholders who have their own unique interests:
Designers want to verify the integrity of the materials they acquire for production
Regulators want to be sure that production standards are being met
Consumers want to be able to verify the authenticity and history of the products they buy
Recycling facilities need accurate information about the contents of the textiles they collect for processing
Manufacturers want to ensure that their competitors are held to similar standards, and also require accurate data about their raw materials
In a system with so many varying interests, it is to everyone’s benefit to have a neutral and transparent source of information that all parties can trust. By relying on multiple block producers and allowing any nodes on the network to verify transactions, all parties can be confident that the data available is an accurate representation of the truth.
The usual drawback of using a blockchain for an application which requires so many entries is the prohibitive cost of transactions and the large amount of computing power needed to run the network. RBN overcomes these challenges by: (a) using an innovative consensus mechanism that allows nodes on the network to run on low level computers and cloud computing instances and (b) using a hybrid database-blockchain architecture which can store and write information far more efficiently than traditional blockchains.
Now that we’ve discussed the more technical aspects of the problem and why RBN is the right tool to solve the problem, let’s imagine how this entire system might look and operate in the real world.
Digital Product Passports (DPP) powered by ChromaWay’s Relational Blockchain Nebula
A Digital Product Passport, or DPP, is a unique object stored on the blockchain that contains all the required information regarding a single textile product. Most people are familiar with the idea of a tracking number which allows you to see a package in the shipping process — you can think of DPPs as a similar idea, except the quantity of information you receive is far more detailed and summarizes an object’s entire lifespan.
Step 1: Production
After a garment is produced in a factory, quality control is conducted before it is released. After the product passes QC, its DPP is registered on the blockchain and tagged with a PRODUCED event. This event would contain several pieces of information, including:
The factory that produced the item
The current date and time of QC
The ID of the quality assurance officer
Information about the materials sourced for production
If, at a later stage, a piece of clothing is found to have production issues, more information about its production can be studied by government agencies, or even the public. This could include issues that affect an entire batch of items (for example, if the materials used contain too high a level of some substance), and issues that affect only the individual garment (i.e. a defective zipper or discoloration). The PRODUCED event is also beneficial to the customer, as it can be referenced later to see the date of production and also to verify the origin of the item.
Step 2: Shipment to retailer
As clothes have gone through the quality assurance process and are deemed to be in good condition, they are then transferred either directly to a retail store or sent to a warehouse. This results in a second DPP entry, SHIPPED. In the case of the clothes going to a warehouse, the clothes will be stored there either until a retail store requests to be provided with a new batch of clothes to sell, or if a customer buys the clothes online. When a customer buys the clothes online, the warehouse is tasked with fulfilling the order and sending it to the customer, in which case the garment would receive another DPP entry DISPATCHED TO CUSTOMER.
The DPP entry could also be updated as the item progresses through the shipping chain, and thus provide tracking info in the same way a tracking number does today.
Step 3: Handing at retail locations
When clothes are received at the retail store and scanned to be inventoried, the clothes get the status of RECEIVED BY RETAILER. The clothes are then once again inspected to see if there are any flaws with them, if there are, then depending on if it’s just a flaw with a singular piece of clothing or a full batch of clothing, one of two things will happen. In the first case the piece of clothing will be marked with RECYCLED, DESTROYED or UPCYCLED status depending on the state of the clothing. The clothes will then be handled according to their given status, either at the location or at a recycling facility. In the other case when there is a problem with several garments of a batch, they will then be marked as FAULTY, since there seems to be an underlying problem with the manufacturing process for that batch of clothes. The faulty clothes will then be returned for inspection at the factory where they were produced.
If a garment passes the quality assurance process, its DPP will then be updated with an AUTHENTICATED status.
When a piece of clothing gets sold, the point of sale system sends the item’s DPP information to the blockchain where it is verified for its authenticity. If the sale goes through, the garment gets marked with a SOLD status. The current time and location is saved, along with the ID of the sales clerk.
Step 4: Consumer usage
During this phase the customer will use the garment they bought, no matter if it’s only for a couple months or several years. If the user has bought a piece of clothing either online or through a brick and mortar store, they will for a limited time have the possibility to return the clothing, doing so will mark the clothing with a RETURNED TO RETAIL where the garments will then be inspected and handled accordingly. This event could also happen even if the grace period for returning the garment is over, but the garment might have ripped or fallen apart prematurely.
When the garment is at the end-of-life for the customer he/she can choose to return the garment to the store they bought it in, or hand it into a general recycling station. In both cases the customer will receive tokens for handing in the garment, these tokens can then be used in select stores for a discount on new clothing articles. In this way we hope to incentivize the customer to return more garments (instead of just discarding them) and thus be able to keep a higher level of traceability for clothes; facilitate reuse/recycling of the used garments (circular economy) and what happens with them at their end-of-life stage.
To encourage customers, a system of recycling tokens could in a future version of the Textile dapp be given to users who return their clothes with the DPP still attached to the garment. Such tokens could then be redeemed for other products at the same store, or possibly even at other stores. In many ways similar to how bottles and cans are returned for recycling today.
Step 5: The recycling phase
When clothes are handed in to a retail store or a recycling station there can be several outcomes of where it ends up. If the garment is still in good condition it might be deemed good enough to sell as second-hand clothing, in this case the garment will be sold again and once again get the SOLD status. Another case would be if the garment is deemed good enough for further use, but not to be sold, then the garment might be donated to charity. This scenario would however not make any event update to the garment.
The last scenario is the one where garments are deemed unfit for further use. In this scenario, the garments would then be updated with one of the following states: RECYCLED, UPCYCLED or DESTROYED. The garments would then be handled either on site or at an external facility, according to the status given.
Circular economies are key to our future
The key to the system is that each actor only interacts with RBN and the DPP once or twice, and often in an automatic way. For example, a cashier at a retail store already scans a clothing tag every time they sell something. The DPP system is functionally identical, but in the background these small actions create a trail of information that can be used by manufacturers, consumers, recycling facilities and governmental and regulatory agencies to improve the overall efficiency and sustainability of the entire industry.
Building the circular economy is a challenging but necessary task to ensure the long term prosperity of the EU. At RBN, we are dedicated to developing blockchain enabled applications that can accelerate this transition and create a more equitable future for everyone.
