PESCO-UP’s “Digital product passports: The golden thread through textile recycling?”

The European textile sector continues to operate on largely linear production models, with around 73 % of post-consumer textiles in the EU incinerated or landfilled (EEA, 2025). Transitioning to a system of durable, reusable, repairable, and recyclable textiles is therefore essential to reducing waste, emissions, and virgin resource dependency. This transition relies on high-quality product and material data. Traceability enables the tracking of fibres, processes, and actors across the supply chain, while transparency ensures that information is accessible to the relevant stakeholders. Reliable data underpin circular business models, support verification of environmental claims, and improve sorting, reuse, and recycling efficiency. 

This first PESCO-UP policy brief aims to contribute timely evidence to the ongoing debate on traceability and transparency in the textiles sector. This comes at a critical moment when the Delegated Act for Textiles under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) is still under preparation. Once adopted, it will define compulsory data to be collected and shared, governance rules, and implementation timelines for the Digital Product Passport (DPP) in the textiles sector. As such, it is essential that the requirements reflect real needs and capacities of actors involved in textile sorting and recycling, while also taking potential challenges for these and other actors in the supply chain (including brands, software providers, manufacturers etc.) into account. Ensuring that the DPP is practical, relevant, and scalable will be crucial to unlocking circular business models in the sector and ultimately achieving the environmental and social outcomes the EU has set for the textile industry.