Textile Industry Circular Supply Chains and Digital Product Passports. Two Case Studies

Abstract

The textile industry is the second largest polluting industry in the world resulting in significant social and environmental impacts throughout its supply chain. The industry experience increased stakeholder pressure to improve sustainability. The European Commission presented the EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles to address issues such as the social and environmental costs of fast fashion, textile waste, the disposal of unsold textiles, and unethical labor practices. The concept of a Digital Product Passport (DPP) is proposed by EU as a key action under the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan for the textile industry to mitigate such challenges. Central to DPP implementation are textile brand owners as they operate global supply chains getting products from manufacturing plants to stores. This paper investigates to what extent textile brand-owners are aware of the coming DPP requirements and how they approach DPP implementation by posing the research question: How is the textile industry using DPPs to move towards circular supply chains? Two case studies, one of a global enterprise and a small-and-medium sized enterprise found that major efforts into the use of DPP has been done by the global enterprise, while the SME company is still evaluating how to proceed to deploy DPP in their supply chain. The results are valuable for textile companies evaluating DPP for circularity improvements, and for researchers by challenges identified for future research.