A structured record of what a product is and what is known about it, reachable from the product itself through a code on the label. The mechanism is in force. The textile content rules are not, and the gap between those two sentences is where most of the confusion in this subject lives.
A Digital Product Passport is a record attached to a product, holding structured information about that product, reachable by anyone who scans the code on it. For a garment that means a data carrier on a swing tag or a sewn-in label, a unique identifier inside it and a service that answers when the identifier is presented.
The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation creates all three. It is in force. It defines the passport at Article 9, the unique product identifier and registry reachability at Article 11, and it requires the carrier to stay reachable across the product's lifetime.
What it does not do is say what a pair of jeans has to carry. That comes from a delegated act for textiles, and no such act has been adopted.
What it connects to
The passport is the last link in a short chain, and each link is a different problem.
An identifier. In practice a GTIN, the number behind a barcode. It identifies the product and, once printed onto goods that are in circulation, it cannot be reassigned.
An address. A URL grammar that carries the identifier, so a code resolves to something specific rather than to a home page.
A carrier. The printed code itself, where error correction level, module size and quiet zone decide whether the thing still scans in five years on a garment that has been washed forty times.
A resolver. The service that answers. A well formed request for an identifier nobody holds should return a not-found, and a request that is malformed should say so instead. Conflating those two is the usual way a resolver stops being trustworthy.
The reason the chain matters is permanence. A code printed into a garment in 2026 is in somebody's wardrobe in 2032, and none of the decisions above can be revised afterwards.
What is settled, and what is not
Three separate things get collapsed into one sentence constantly. Keeping them apart is most of the value of reading anything about this.
The three layers, and where each one currently stands.
Layer
What it covers
Where it stands
The framework
That passports exist, what an identifier is, what a carrier has to do.
In force
The infrastructure
The registry, and the standards work that supports it.
Adopted, not yet applicable
The textile rules
Which attributes a textile passport carries, at what granularity, from when.
Indicative only
The order of that table is the part worth noticing. The plumbing was legislated first.
One delegated act has been adopted under the framework so far, and it concerns the destruction of unsold goods rather than product data. It is regularly cited as evidence that product rules have begun to arrive. It is not that.
For textiles the Commission's working plan names the category as a first priority and gives an indicative adoption year. Indicative, in a work plan. Application then follows adoption by a period the framework sets as a floor rather than a schedule. Anybody converting those two things into a date your products must comply by has performed an arithmetic the instruments do not support. The year, and everything that qualifies it, is on the status page rather than here.
Which parts are in force, which are adopted and which have only been signalled is tracked row by row, with sources and verification dates, on the status page. It is the only page here that states dates.
What actually goes in one
Since the textile act does not exist, every published attribute set is an anticipation of it, including ours. We carry twenty two attributes, chosen from the framework, from the instruments that already apply to textiles and from what a passport has to hold to be useful to somebody other than the brand.
The interesting thing about that set is not its length. It is how unevenly the evidence behind it is distributed. Some fields are already in the business and need tidying. Some belong to a mill or a factory and cannot be produced by the brand alone. A few have no settled method behind them anywhere, and for those the correct behaviour today is to wait and record why.
The field guide sets out all twenty two with that difficulty on the face of the table.
What a passport is not
It is not proof of compliance. A passport is a record of what is known about a product, and a complete-looking passport can sit on a product that meets nothing.
It is not a marketing surface. The audience includes a consumer, a recycler, a customs officer and a market surveillance authority. Three of those four have no interest at all in the brand story.
It is not a replacement for the label. Whether a passport eventually displaces any part of the sewn-in label is open, and nobody should be planning around an answer yet.
And it is not an assertion that everything in it is true. The honest version distinguishes what resolved, what could not be established and what does not apply, which is the subject of the evidence page.
Names textiles as a first priority and gives an indicative adoption year. An indication in a work plan rather than an adopted instrument. The year is stated on the status page, which is the only page here that carries one.
Adopted, not yet applicableOfficial source confirmed, detailed review pending
Named here because the infrastructure was legislated before the content. We have not read the enacting terms, so nothing on this page rests on their detail. The adoption date is on the status page.