They’re coming, and sooner than you might realize. In a few short years, Digital Product Passports will be mandated, by law, for all sorts of products sold in the European Union (EU). Retailers, suppliers, distributors, importers, and others should start preparing now for this first-of-its-kind regulatory framework. The next Digital Product Passport deadline for retail — in July 2027 — will be here before we know it.
With its Digital Product Passport (DPP) regulatory framework, the European Commission seeks to create unprecedented transparency around product information, reduce waste and environmental impacts, and help accelerate the transition to a circular economy. For retail, this means ensuring each product is affixed with a digitally readable tag that contains detailed information on materials used, manufacturing processes, and recyclability.
That requires a lot of preparation and operational change. Retailers will not only need to ensure their suppliers comply, they’ll also need to collect and share product history data that can be easily accessed by consumers. There are a handful of technologies that can enable such traceability, including RAIN RFID.
How Digital Product Passports will affect retail
With Digital Product Passports, the EU is responding to rising consumer expectations for product sustainability and transparency, along with increasing supply chain pressures and the digitization of the global economy. Savvy organizations are already preparing for the first retail product category to gain DPP requirements — textiles — which includes apparel, footwear, workwear, linens, and even less obvious products like truck covers, cleaning rags, and restaurant napkins.
Chiefly, the EU wants to cut down on waste. Every year, over 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of textile waste is produced per person in Europe. Most of this, per the EU’s DPP consortium CIRPASS, is discarded clothing and home textiles. Worldwide, only 13% of clothing material is recycled in some way, and less than 1% is recycled into new clothing, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
To enable consumers to make more informed buying decisions, DPP regulations will require each product to have a “digital twin,” a record of information about the product, available for consumers to access by scanning a barcode, QR code, RFID tag, NFC tag, or a combination of these technologies. You can learn more about the basics of Digital Product Passports in my previous blog post on the topic.
While reducing waste and environmental impact is paramount — and a key corporate value of Impinj — DPPs will bring many opportunities for retailers to streamline their supply chains, enhance their inventory management, curtail waste, and deliver new customer experiences.
How retailers can prepare for Digital Product Passports
In the current proposed timeline, July 2027 is the deadline for retailers and suppliers to comply with Digital Product Passport requirements for textiles. In our global economy, the effects of these regulations will ripple around the world. Though legislation is still being written, there are ways to start preparing now.
Businesses should first identify an expert within their organization, or a trusted consultant, to take responsibility for tracking Digital Product Passport legislation as it progresses and evolves. This person can serve as a DPP subject matter expert and participate in building their organization’s DPP strategy.
With a subject matter expert in place, retailers and suppliers can begin to outline their Digital Product Passport strategy based on their organization’s specific products and needs. This includes understanding DPP data collection requirements, and evaluating systems and technologies that will help their organization achieve DPP compliance.
One such consideration: Because “data carriers” like RAIN RFID tags and barcodes will increasingly accompany products throughout their lifecycles, organizations should assess what technologies will protect their customers’ privacy by limiting access to DPP-mandated data. The latest RAIN RFID tag chips from Impinj, for example, can be disabled once a consumer buys a tagged item, preventing unintended tag reads — and can be re-enabled if a product is returned to a store.
Completing this critical strategic work, well before the compliance deadline for textiles, will help businesses ensure they don’t fall behind.
Advantages of RAIN RFID for Digital Product Passports
Implementing a RAIN RFID solution is a great way to get a jump on preparing for Digital Product Passports. RAIN RFID is a passive, battery-free, wireless technology that uses radio frequency identification to connect billions of everyday items to the internet and can help retailers collect and manage the data they’ll need to meet DPP requirements.
With RAIN RFID, organizations can read more than a thousand tagged items a second, without direct line-of-sight and from up to 30 feet (9 meters). And because RAIN RFID tag chips are so tiny, tags can also be sewn into textiles — there’s even thread that incorporates little RFID tags. In fact, more and more manufacturers are embedding RAIN RFID tags directly into their products.
By tagging every product with a small RAIN RFID tag, retailers can create digital twins for every item they sell, collect the data required for Digital Product Passports, and prepare data for sharing with consumers, even if RAIN RFID isn’t a mandated data carrier. And while we envision a future in which RAIN RFID reading is built into smartphones — which, combined with embedded tagging, will extend RAIN RFID capabilities even further — today RAIN RFID can be used in conjunction with data carriers like barcodes or QR codes so that consumers can retrieve product information.
The benefits of RAIN RFID for retail extend far beyond Digital Product Passport compliance. This level of real-time visibility, down to the individual item, also enables omnichannel fulfillment, frictionless self-checkout, loss prevention, and more. Retailers that are focused on long-term success know there’s an industry-wide digital transformation under way — and they see RFID as the linchpin.
We at Impinj believe no other technology being considered for the Digital Product Passport program offers as many benefits to retailers as RAIN RFID.
