The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is linked to the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR, EU 2024/1781), which aims to make products on the EU market more environmentally sustainable.
A digital product passport is a set of product information available in electronic form. It is designed to improve traceability and transparency throughout the product’s entire lifecycle. It brings the product’s life cycle data together and serves as an important tool for communicating information to consumers and other actors in the product’s value chain. The Ecodesign Regulation aims to reduce products’ greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. The digital product passport would make this information, among other things, available to various stakeholders.
The Ecodesign Regulation identifies textiles as one of the product groups for which measures and requirements should be developed primarily. Other product groups mentioned in the regulation that are worth prioritizing include steel and aluminum products, furniture, tires, cleaning products, paints, and chemicals.
The production volumes of textiles, particularly clothing, are growing at an unsustainable rate. Furthermore, textiles have a short lifespan, and unsold products are discarded without ever being used. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions and other negative environmental impacts from textile products are accelerating. Fortunately, consumers, businesses, and lawmakers have started to demand more detailed information about the environmental impacts of textile products.
What does a digital product passport for a textile product include?
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has prepared a report (draft) for textile products. It specifies what information a digital product passport for textiles should contain. The report proposes that the digital product passport for textiles should include information on, for example, the product’s:
- Materials
- Mechanical properties (durability)
- Chemicals
- Recyclability
- Share and origin of recycled material
- Carbon footprint
- Maintenance and repairability
According to the Ecodesign Regulation, the digital product passport must be user-friendly and based on high-quality, up-to-date information. In practice, the information contained in the digital product passport could in the future be accessed, for example, via a QR code attached to a garment or another scannable identifier.
Why is calculating the carbon footprint of textiles so important?
A product-specific carbon footprint is typically based on a life cycle assessment (LCA). The EU has developed specific product group rules (PEFCR) for textile products to guide the calculation of the environmental impacts of clothing and footwear throughout their life cycle. Adherence to common calculation rules enables a credible comparison of environmental impacts.
Emissions from textile products arise at many different stages, including the production of raw materials, fiber manufacturing, yarn spinning, bleaching, dyeing, weaving or knitting, finishing and other treatments as well as sewing. In addition, emissions result from transportation at various stages of the production chain and from material waste generated during processes. Life cycle assessments also account for emissions generated during the use of a garment, which arise from garment care. Finally, the emissions generated at the end of the product’s life cycle are taken into account. In addition to different production pathways, the emissions from textile products are greatly influenced by the materials used and the country in which the product is manufactured.
Without product-specific calculations, it is impossible to know the stage of a textile product’s life cycle at which most emissions are generated and how those emissions can be reduced. For this reason, a digital product passport requires reliable emissions calculations to support it.
What makes calculating the emissions of textile products so challenging?
When incorporating carbon footprint data into a digital product passport, collecting reliable emission factors can prove to be surprisingly challenging. Emission factors are scattered across various databases, studies, and, with a bit of luck, suppliers. Furthermore, the values of emission factors may vary quite significantly across different sources. There are several reasons for this variation, such as different calculation methods and assumptions, the timeliness of the data, country-specific differences, and incomplete information on recycled materials.
The limited availability of emission factors for textile products reflects the complex and global nature of the industry’s supply chains. Tracing the origin of a product’s materials, its manufacturing stages, and the associated environmental impacts can be difficult as the information is scattered across multiple stakeholders at different stages of the value chain. Corporate sustainability and procurement teams may have to spend a significant amount of time searching for, evaluating, and comparing reliable emission factors. Incomplete and inconsistent data complicates the reliable calculation of environmental impacts, sustainability reporting, and the implementation and development of digital product passports. The lack of consistent and easily accessible data sources underscores the need for better data management and transparency throughout the textile value chain.
A solution to automate emissions calculations for textiles
Since finding emissions data for textile products is often tedious and time-consuming, we developed a new tool for determining emission factors for textiles. It makes calculating product-specific carbon footprints significantly easier and faster. The calculations are based on reliable emission factors from the OpenCO2 and Ecoinvent databases. The OpenCO2 emissions database is developed and maintained by the OpenCO2net team. It is the most comprehensive one in Finland and contains approximately 8,000 emission factors selected and validated by experts. Ecoinvent, on the other hand, is the world’s most comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) database. It produces and provides high-quality and transparent environmental data.
The tool can be used to determine emissions associated with yarn, fabric, finished garments, or other textile products made from different materials, by country of production. Emissions resulting from energy consumption can be calculated accurately using country-specific emission factors. Additionally, the calculation takes transport at each stage of the production chain into account. Various treatments such as bleaching, dyeing, mercerization, or finishing can also be added to the calculation. The tool can be utilized in the implementation of company-specific carbon footprint calculators, allowing for the company’s needs and unique supply chains to be taken into account. Additionally, the generated emission factors, accounting for customers’ unique procurement and supply chains, can be integrated into companies’ own systems via our OpenCO2 API solution. This helps in generating reliable data for digital product passports and standardizing emissions calculations within the company, eliminating the need to manually search for emission factors from multiple sources.
High-quality data is the foundation of the digital product passport
A digital product passport is based on reliable data. Therefore, companies in the textile industry should start investing in data management, supply chain transparency, product-specific emissions calculations, and standardized calculation models right now. Companies that can efficiently generate accurate environmental data are in a strong position from both customer and future regulatory perspectives.
The textile industry is one of the key sectors where we have assisted companies with both corporate- and product-level calculations. We have also produced a report for the Finnish Textile and Fashion Association on the global climate impacts of the Finnish textile and fashion industry.
