What a passport programme looks like when it works

The distinction that separates the survivors

Put the documented programmes into two piles by what the scan actually does.

In the first pile the scan performs an action. Fnac Darty's code books a repair from the scan itself. Woolworths' two dimensional barcode stops an expired pack at the till. 7-Eleven Thailand chose a Data Matrix that blocks a sale at the point of purchase. Amazon Transparency blocks a shipment of goods the programme does not recognise. Polytag's code pays a small sum to the person holding the container. Chloé and Coach use digital identities to route a resale listing.

In the second pile the scan opens a page. The best documented casualty in this pile is a wool traceability programme that let a buyer trace a garment to the growers, ran for years, and then disappeared from its own parent brand's transparency page without an announcement.

The difference is not information quality. Several of the programmes in the second pile carried better and more carefully assembled information than the survivors. What separates the piles is that an action has somebody on the other end of it who wanted it to happen, and a document does not.

Stated as a mechanism rather than as a correlation, the claim is this. A transaction implies a party with standing to act and a reason to act, and those two conditions are what a record needs before it changes anything. Where the scan is the transaction, both are satisfied by construction. Where the scan is a document, both have to be supplied by somebody's optional interest, and optional interest is the thing nobody in this category has been able to measure.

That is the same finding the estate's decision chain reaches from the inside, on what has to be true before a passport changes a decision.

Four things that travel with the pattern

The most durable deployments are not consumer facing at all

The largest operating item level identity systems in the world do not depend on a shopper choosing to scan anything. The scanning is done by machines, by staff or by a platform. EU tobacco traceability moves event volumes in the hundreds of millions per month. Amazon reports having verified billions of units through Transparency. Avery Dennison's atma.io reports tens of billions of items.

Consumer scanning, where it exists in these programmes, is a layer bolted onto infrastructure that already pays for itself. Where the consumer scan is the whole business case, evidence of survival is thin. What a resolver log can and cannot tell you about that scanning is a separate question and it is taken apart on what a scan actually tells you, which also carries the measured range and the reason no single scan rate exists.

Regulation predicts deployment better than demand does

The programmes that reached scale did so because something made them necessary. U-Label exists because an EU wine regulation made it mandatory. EPREL exists because the energy label mandates it. Tobacco traceability exists because a directive requires it. Fnac Darty built a single passport to satisfy three separate instruments at once.

The instructive inverse is SmartLabel, a voluntary US grocery disclosure programme built by an industry partly to forestall mandated on pack disclosure, which reached more than a hundred thousand products. More than most mandated schemes. Either way the driver was legal rather than a measured consumer appetite.

Who pays decides who survives

Amazon Transparency charges a small per unit fee and has tens of thousands of brands paying it, because the payer receives enforcement in return. That is a clean commercial loop and it does not need anybody to be interested in sustainability.

Against that, the pilots with no named payer end when their funding does. CIRPASS closed in March 2024 and Battery Pass in March 2025, the second replaced by another funded project. Neither is a failure. A grant-funded programme has a defined end date written into it from the start, which is a different thing from a commercial one stopping, and it is worth telling the two apart when you are counting what is still running.

The only quantified benefits are operational

The hard percentages in the documented set come from till and inventory systems, and they exist because the retailer already ran something that would notice a change. Nothing on the consumer side is measured, because nobody has a system that would notice. Why that is a fact about instrumentation rather than about consumers, and what happens to the return figures that circulate in its place, is on whether better product information sells more.

What the public record leaves out, and why it matters to a count

Three absences shape every published picture of this category, and each one biases it in the same direction.

Endings are not announced. Launches carry a press release and a volume target. Discontinuations carry nothing. The wool programme vanished from its parent's own page. A blockchain provenance company's site simply stopped updating and the business went into administration months later. One British brand's public commitment to put digital identities on all products by a stated year has no visible trace on its own site now.

Adopter lists are not checked. Several apparel brands named as adopters in vendor material surfaced no consumer visible programme at all when their own live sites were checked in August 2026. The check is not sophisticated. It is opening the brand's website and looking.

Scan rates are not published. Not by any operator, anywhere, in any category. The number is trivially instrumented, every operator has it, and none of them divide it by units shipped. SmartLabel, run in the United States by the Consumer Brands Association, publishes both a product count and an annual interaction count and does not divide one by the other. Doing the division yourself produces a figure in the low hundreds of interactions per product line per year, which against ordinary unit volumes implies a rate deep in fractions of a per cent for most lines. That arithmetic is ours, from two figures the association published, and it should be treated as arithmetic rather than as a measurement they made.

The consequence for anybody assembling a market picture is direct. Any count of live programmes built from announcements is an over-count, and the size of the error is unknown. The only reliable check is to open the brand's own site and see whether the thing is still there.

The one place the public claims and the public evidence point the same way

Where a programme gives the person holding the object something material at the moment they scan, volumes get published and commitments get made in the near term rather than the distant one. Polytag's deposit return code and Fnac Darty's repair booking are the two clearest cases, and they are among the very few carrying published volume commitments dated within a year or two rather than at the end of a decade.

That is worth stating carefully. It is not evidence that consumers want passports. It is evidence that the two programmes offering a consumer a transaction rather than a document are the two whose operators were willing to publish a number.

What follows for a business deciding what to build

Three questions, in this order, and each has a checkable answer.

What does the scan let somebody do? If the honest answer is that it lets them read something, the programme has no mechanism for a second interaction and no party with a reason to make one happen. That may still be the right thing to build, because a duty to make information reachable is discharged by the carrier working. It is not a business case, and it should not be funded as one.

Who is on the other end, and are they already there? The chain holds reliably when the object stays inside a known relationship for its life. An asset under a service contract, an item under warranty, a component returning to the remanufacturer that built it. It breaks reliably when the object arrives anonymously, at volume, in the hands of somebody with no prior connection to it. That contrast, worked through at the textile end, is set out on what has to be true before a passport changes a decision.

Who pays, and what do they get? Not who benefits in principle. Who has a budget line and receives something in return for it. The programmes still running answer that question in one sentence. The programmes that ended answered it with a grant.

Three answers you can give in a sentence each, and the programme is infrastructure. Three answers that need a slide, and it is a compliance artefact with a launch event attached. That is not an argument against building the compliance artefact. A duty to make information reachable is discharged whether or not anybody reads it, and there is something to be said for a programme that is honest about being one thing rather than quietly funded as another. What a scan can and cannot tell you afterwards is measured on what a scan actually tells you.

Sources

• A case library of forty-six documented programmes, compiled 27 August 2026
  Field research

  The load bearing source. Cases were compiled from vendor announcements, brand publications, association reporting and, where available, the operators' own live sites checked in August 2026. It is a library of documented cases and not a sample of a defined population, so no rate, share or average is drawn from it here.

• An industry association's published product and interaction totals
  Association reporting

  Used for one purpose only: the division of interactions by product lines, which is our arithmetic on two figures the association published rather than a measurement the association made or endorsed.

• Two European passport pilot programmes and their published closure dates
  Programme publications

  Cited for the fact and the dates of closure and for nothing about what the pilots found.

Sources as at 30 August 2026.