Scaling Circular Systems with Digital IDs

Digital ID technology and textile-to-textile circular systems

Until now, the fashion industry has been unable to scale and operationalize circular models. One of the main challenges is the lack of infrastructure to identify and manage goods after sale. With the upcoming EU legislation on Digital Product Passports, brands will be required to leverage Digital ID technology to share product data with circular ecosystem partners, laying the foundation for scaled circular business models.

A pre-competitive collaboration, this Industry-Aligned Action Plan provides a roadmap to profitably grow fashion’s circular economy through a viable, global digital ecosystem. At its heart is a call for a shared digital infrastructure and adoption of global standards — essential for brands to capture the resale market, grow textile-to-textile circular business models, and enable the ongoing identification, management and monetization of products and materials.

If implemented successfully, the action plan would connect products, their producers, new service models and recycling systems to create an intelligent, interdependent cloud-infrastructure for commerce.

Industry-Aligned Action Plan: Digital ID to Scale Circular Systems
EON and Accelerating Circularity, in partnership with Eunomia Research and Consulting, announce the launch of an Industry-Aligned Action Plan Digital ID to Scale Circular Systems.

The report illuminates the transformational role of Digital ID technology, outlines its challenges and opportunities and codifies best-practices, roadmaps and solutions – essential to scale textile-to-textile circular business models. This Action Plan introduces a viable, industry-wide system for collection and sorting to profitably grow fashion’s circular economy. It also calls on the imperative of data standards, digital interoperability and cloud infrastructure essential to fueling this network for brands to start capitalizing.

“One of the greatest challenges the industry is facing is how to identify products accurately to support the development of end-markets, be it improved reuse and resale, collection, sorting, pre-processing or recycling. All the pieces are in place for Digital ID-enabled products to deliver the solution. What’s needed now is a commitment by organizations throughout the value chain to collaborate on trialing and scaling these technologies, to unlock a circular economy for textiles.” – Sarah Edwards, CEO, Eunomia Research and Consulting, North America.

The Action Plan shares how global adoption of Digital IDs would connect products, their producers, new service models and recycling systems to create an intelligent, interdependent cloud-infrastructure for commerce.

The Action Plan reviews the challenges, opportunities, and imperatives to developing the digital infrastructure underlying a data-driven circular fashion system. If designed correctly, digital identification solutions have the potential to provide brands with the financial incentives for scalability, customers with services and transparency, circular value chain stakeholders with essential product and material data, and policy initiatives with the data for measurement and accountability.

Karla Magruder
Founder, Accelerating Circularity