Textile Digital Product Passport knowledge
What a textile Digital Product Passport is, who carries the duty, what one has to hold and where the evidence behind each field comes from. Where a question is settled, this says so and shows the instrument. Where it is not settled, it says that instead rather than filling the gap with a confident answer.
On this page
The estate in five families
Everything here belongs to one of five families, and a family is a job rather than a subject. A reader who arrives worried about scope should not have to guess whether the answer was filed under regulation, under status or under evidence, so each family is named for what the reader is trying to do rather than for the shelf the material came off.
Each family opens at its own starting page, and that page lists the rest of the family. Only those five starting pages are linked from here, deliberately: an entrance that links to every destination has told the reader nothing about what to read first. The members are named below without links, so the shape is visible before you commit to a page.
1. Does this reach you
Work out whether any of this lands on my business, in which role, in which market and when.
What reaches you. The family opens with what a textile Digital Product Passport actually is, then moves to which role you occupy and what already applies to you today. After that come the boundary questions: whether the UK has an equivalent, what a listing has to carry, what happens to a second-hand garment and what registering a passport involves.
What is settled, and when. The dated material sits at the end of this family rather than at its front, in the status tracker and in the question of which standards carry a presumption of conformity. Arriving at a date before understanding the mechanism is how this category usually goes wrong.
Start at what a textile Digital Product Passport is, which lists the rest of the family.
2. What a passport carries
Find out what a passport has to hold and get each attribute right.
The hub holds every attribute we track, with the evidence difficulty of each one on the face of the table rather than in a footnote. Beneath it sit the attributes that carry an argument of their own: fibre composition, recycled content, country of origin, identifiers and the SCIP reference.
Start at what a passport has to carry, which lists the rest of the family.
3. How you know
Establish, defend and maintain a fact about a product.
How we know. The method destination is this family's own entry, and it is the page the rest of the estate defers to. It sets out the resolution states, the kinds of absence we keep apart and what happens when two sources disagree.
Where evidence comes from. Getting evidence out of suppliers, then what a certificate, a declaration or a test report actually weighs. Then chemical data, and whether it reaches the garment at all.
What a value will support. What a passport field can and cannot prove, then what to do when the lab and the supplier disagree. Then what you are allowed to put when you do not know, which is the question people ask last and should ask first.
After you publish. Who has to own a published field once it is out, then what a scan actually tells you. Then what a recycler can actually use, which is a measurement question rather than a marketing one.
Start at how we know and what a blank means, which lists the rest of the family.
4. Doing the work
Plan, cost and sequence the work.
Where the data already is, then what unit a passport is issued in, then how far up the chain you actually have to go, then what the work costs. Last comes why a mapping that looked complete stopped meaning the same thing. That one is a diagnostic, and a reader reaches it after something has gone wrong rather than before.
Start at passports from a Shopify catalogue, which lists the rest of the family.
5. The passport itself
Understand the artefact, how it is reached and what keeps it reachable.
One real garment annotated row by row, including the rows that stayed empty and the reason each one did. Then what actually happens when somebody scans the code, which is a chain of separable steps rather than a single act. Then what happens when the link stops answering.
Start at a passport, annotated, which lists the rest of the family.
How to read anything here
Named sources
Every regulatory statement names its instrument and its article, and says how far that source has been reviewed.
Typed absence
A record that cannot be reached, one nobody has looked for and one that could not exist are three different findings, and they are never merged.
Numbers with denominators
Every figure carries what it was measured on and when, in the same sentence rather than in a footnote.
Those three habits are the whole of it. The vocabulary underneath them, the resolution states and the several different things a blank can mean, belongs to the family called how you know.
What a certificate proves
A certificate proves what it certifies and nothing adjacent to it. That is not a rhetorical flourish: of the chain of custody schemes whose published rules we read, two independently print materially the same disclaimer on the face of a scope certificate, that it is no proof that any goods delivered by its holder are certified. Proof of the goods is a different document, the transaction certificate, which in those same rules carries no expiry field at all.
The consequence is small and it decides a lot of arguments. A supplier's scope certificate tells you that the supplier held a certified scope. It does not tell you that the garment in front of you came through that scope, and no amount of adjacency makes it do so.
Two positions we are holding
We are not saying here which family of claim draws the most enforcement. The pattern we can see runs across a register this estate assembled rather than across enforcement everywhere, and part of that register has not yet been read against the primary decisions, so it is a fact about our set and not yet a fact about the world.
We are also not saying here which obligation in this territory arrives first. That is a question about dates. Dates belong to one page and this is not it.
Where the dates live
Every date this estate holds, with the stage each instrument has reached and how far we have read it, sits on the textile passport status page and on no other page here.
Sources
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Chain of custody scheme rules, scope and transaction certificate specificationsPublished scheme rulesRelevant provisions reviewed
Carried for one sentence on this page: what a scope certificate states about itself on its own face, and that proof of the goods is a separate transaction certificate. The published rules were read. The wider scheme documentation behind them was not, so nothing here is said about a scheme whose rules we have not opened.
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Assembled register of advertising and consumer protection decisionsAssembled enforcement recordRelevant provisions reviewed
Carried only in order to say what this estate is not publishing. The set is partly unverified against the primary decisions, so no statement about which family of claim draws the most enforcement appears anywhere on this page.
Help someone else make sense of product passports.