Making circularity a reality with circularity.ID®

In a circular fashion system, garments need to be designed not only for recycling but also to be used longer and more intensively. But the product’s design is just the starting point. To be able to circulate, essential product data needs to be accessible to all stakeholders along the value chain for them to optimize decision-making on use, reuse, and recycling.

That’s why in 2019 circular.fashion launched the circularity.ID® Digital Product Passport which defines product data requirements, connects the data to the product via a product identifier, and thus enables stakeholders across the value chain such as the customers, resellers, lenders, and textile sorters to access information essential for managing and maximizing product value of fashion and textiles via a digital product site.

The European Commission recently published the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, which aims to transition the fashion industry towards circularity by 2030, revealing that digital product passports, such as the circularity.ID®, will play a key role by providing new business opportunities for value chain partners, supporting consumers in making sustainable choices, and creating a reverse supply chain to ensure products are cycled more efficiently.

With the circularity.ID®, fashion brands are able to offer full transparency and a take-back-system to their customers, empowering them to make more sustainable choices by providing them with detailed information on material traceability and care instructions while informing them on take-back and repair services to enable prolonged use, resale, and recycling. The brand is able to receive data on customer engagement of the product, as well as lifecycle data such as number of repairs to feed it back into the design process to create more durable products.

At the end of life of the product, the customer can scan the identifier to understand the takeback services that the company offers, whether it is in-store collection or pre-paid mailing labels to mail back to the brand or sorter partner. Post-consumer textile sorters that are provided with Intelligent Sorting Stations developed by circular.fashion have the possibility to directly recognise the exact material composition as well as commercial factors such as the resale value of used textiles and thus to allocate sorting fractions more efficiently and accurately. Thanks to the improved sorting quality, it will be possible to serve high-value reuse or recycling fractions.

Within the Closed Loop Pilot initiated by circular.fashion and FairWertung e.V., a German association of textile collectors and sorters, the fashion brands ARMEDANGELS, Besonnen, OTTO, The Slow Label, Vretena, and Hannah Schorch put the closed loop systems to the test. Within the framework of the project, the participating fashion brands each developed a circular collection, equipped with the circularity.ID®. Take-back strategies were mapped out for each product, so that the textiles could be returned to test the return channels and intelligent sorting stations, of which two have already been installed in Germany. circular.fashion aims to have a second version of the Closed Loop Pilot in the UK.

About circular.fashion

circular.fashion is a Berlin-based innovation company founded in 2018 with the goal of enabling a circular fashion system. They support fashion players on their journey towards circularity starting from the design phase with their workshops and criteria, to software products and establishing a reverse supply chain. Since then, they have collaborated with a number of established fashion and lifestyle brands such as Zalando, Hugo Boss, Kering group, H&M, ARMEDANGELS, and Ganni. Visit their website to learn more and get started.