The introduction of the Digital Product Passport (DPP) by the European Union is not merely a new compliance requirement. It marks a deeper shift, through the move from declared sustainability to verifiable sustainability, based on traceable data across the entire value chain. As a result, traceability technologies, data governance and stakeholder-oriented organisational models are beginning to converge.
For Benefit Companies, this transformation raises a strategic question: how to make corporate purpose visible, measurable and credible across the supply chain.
In this scenario, the relationship between the Digital Product Passport and Benefit Companies becomes a tangible lever for turning sustainability commitments into accessible, traceable and verifiable information.
For a long time, sustainability was something companies talked about. Today, it has to be proven.
Competitiveness will no longer depend solely on the ability to produce or distribute efficiently, but also on the ability to make reliable information accessible on product origin, compliance, environmental impact and circularity.
Sustainability is therefore gradually ceasing to be a function separate from business operations and is becoming an organisational capability involving governance, supply chain, procurement, compliance and data management.
For Benefit Companies, the generation of common benefit, whatever its nature – environmental, social or territorial -, can no longer rely solely on statements of intent, but requires tools capable of making impact measurable, documentable and verifiable over time.
As a result, the role of the Digital Product Passport is emerging not merely as a regulatory requirement, but as a potential infrastructure of trust between companies, the market and stakeholders.
The supply chain is where sustainability is truly verified.
Today’s supply chains are highly fragmented, involve a wide range of actors and are often geographically dispersed. A single product may pass through multiple suppliers, manufacturing plants, logistics operators and different markets before reaching the final consumer. And it is not uncommon for operational complexity to translate into a lack of information transparency.
The first issue concerns limited visibility across the supply chain.
Companies generally have information about their direct suppliers, but struggle to control the subsequent tiers of the value chain. Yet it is precisely in the upstream tiers that many environmental and social risks are concentrated, including, for example, the origin of raw materials, working conditions and emissions generated by production processes.
Added to this is the fragmentation of ESG data.
Information on compliance, certifications, environmental impact or recycled content exists, but it is often spread across different systems, collected in non-standardised ways and difficult to verify in real time.
The result is a form of sustainability that is frequently built after the event, reported through isolated documentation, periodic audits or supplier declarations and self-declarations, but not genuinely integrated into everyday operational processes.
This fragmentation also creates a problem of responsibility.
Although production is distributed across the supply chain, reputational and legal risk tends to be concentrated on the final brand.
Consider, for example, the recent judicial administration measures adopted by the Court of Milan against major operators in the fashion, luxury and logistics sectors. In these cases, the contracting companies were challenged over their inability to prevent and detect labour exploitation and irregularities in their contracting and subcontracting chains. These measures highlighted the absence of adequate systems to control, monitor and verify suppliers’ operating conditions, underlining how a company’s organisational responsibility can no longer stop at its direct relationship with the first tier of the supply chain.
The key point is that corporate responsibility is now increasingly assessed not only in relation to what a company produces directly, but also in relation to its ability to govern information across its own supply chain.
Any issues relating to safety, compliance or ESG impacts are in fact perceived by the market as the responsibility of the company that manages the relationship with the consumer.
This shift is now becoming increasingly evident from a legal perspective too, where information transparency is gradually influencing the commercial validation of the product itself.
To remain within this evolving context, it is worth referring to the ruling of the Court of Venice of 18 April 2025, no. 2005, which highlighted how the absence of technical and compliance documentation – including CE marking and mandatory declarations – may affect the very marketability of the goods, even giving rise to a case of aliud pro alio1. The principle expressed by the Court is particularly significant because it shows how information relating to compliance, traceability and technical documentation is gradually becoming an integral part of a product’s identity.
Transparency is therefore no longer just a matter of ESG communication or corporate reputation, but directly affects the commercial validation of goods, their marketability and the very possibility of demonstrating their reliability and compliance across the supply chain.
From this perspective, tools such as the Digital Product Passport do not simply introduce new information obligations, but help to redefine the relationship between product, data and organisational responsibility.
At the same time, European lawmakers are progressively shifting the focus from the individual company to the entire “chain of activities”. The CSDDD Directive (2024/1760) requires companies to map, monitor and prevent environmental and social risks throughout the supply chain, including business partners, suppliers and distributors.
All of this leads to a view of traceability no longer merely as an operational advantage, but as a strategic, organisational and legal necessity.
The central issue, therefore, is not simply to collect data, but to build a reliable infrastructure for supply chain governance. Digital technology consequently plays a decisive role: transforming traceability from a fragmented documentary exercise into a continuous organisational capability, powered by reliable data across the entire value chain.
For this reason, talking about the Digital Product Passport and Benefit Companies also means talking about information architectures capable of connecting purpose, processes and responsibility across the entire supply chain.
Sustainability data is generated during the industrial process. The origin of raw materials, certifications, product composition, batches, movements, transformations, quality controls, compliance information, environmental data and instructions for reuse or end of life must be collected, linked and updated continuously, consistently and reliably.
This is why the Digital Product Passport cannot be seen as an isolated project or a simple informational front end. It must communicate with the systems that already govern business operations: ERP, warehouse, logistics, procurement, supplier platforms, automatic identification systems, mobile solutions, field data collection tools and applications used across the different stages of the supply chain.
The key point is to associate every piece of information with a precise reference: a product, a batch, a component, a raw material or a specific stage in the process. This is where digital technology makes it possible to move from dispersed data, often managed in separate files or documents, to a structured, updatable and verifiable information asset.
In this journey, RFID technology has proved particularly effective: applied across production and logistics chains, it enables the automatic and large-scale reading of batches and individual items, reduces traceability errors and makes product data available in real time. Operators such as Aton, with an established presence in industrial traceability processes, have helped make this technology accessible and integrable even in highly variable production environments, such as those typical of the fashion supply chain and advanced manufacturing.
Building an effective Digital Product Passport therefore means defining genuine data governance: which information to collect, from which sources, with which responsibilities, how often it should be updated and with which levels of access.
Not all stakeholders need the same information. An end consumer, a supervisory authority, a logistics partner, a repair centre or a supplier all have different needs. The digital passport must therefore guarantee transparency, but also security, interoperability and control.
Unique codes, QR codes, RFID, NFC, cloud platforms, APIs and data integration systems are enabling tools. Their value, however, only emerges when they are integrated into the company’s real processes and when data is managed according to clear criteria of quality, responsibility, updating and access.
The availability of structured and verifiable data enables companies to:
Understood in this way, the Digital Product Passport becomes an operational infrastructure through which a company makes the quality of its supply chain governance visible.
The relationship between Benefit Companies and the Digital Product Passport is not limited to a simple convergence between sustainability and technological innovation. There is a deeper alignment, concerning the very way in which a company organises its responsibility across the supply chain.
The Benefit Company model introduces a structural transformation in corporate governance: common benefit is not a reputational objective separate from economic activity, but a criterion that must guide decisions, processes, industrial relationships and operational organisation.
The measurability of impact plays a central role. A common benefit that cannot be verified risks remaining confined to the realm of declarations, while today’s regulatory and market context demands increasingly accessible, reliable and demonstrable information.
It is precisely in this space that the Digital Product Passport gains strategic relevance for Benefit Companies.
The DPP makes it possible to transform sustainability from narrative into data efficiency. The origin of raw materials, compliance, product composition, environmental impacts, manufacturing processes, repairability, reuse and circularity become traceable pieces of information across the entire product life cycle, shareable among the different actors in the supply chain. For a Benefit Company, this means being able to create a tangible continuity between purpose, governance and day-to-day operations.
Transparency is no longer only about external communication, but about a company’s ability to manage its supply chain relationships, decision-making processes and the impacts generated across the value chain in a coherent way.
From this point of view, the Digital Product Passport becomes a mechanism of organisational accountability, capable of narrowing the gap between the commitments made by a company and their actual verifiability.
Benefit Companies therefore appear to be among the organisations naturally best placed to adopt advanced models of digital traceability. Their governance structure, stakeholder orientation, reporting culture and need to demonstrate the pursuit of common benefit create particularly fertile ground for the integration of systems such as the Digital Product Passport.
But the DPP also highlights a second element that is set to become increasingly important: transparency cannot be built individually. The quality and reliability of data depend on collaboration between supply chain actors, the sharing of common standards, the ability to integrate different systems and the construction of relationships based on mutual trust.
In this sense, collaborative ecosystems geared towards spreading a “mission-driven” culture can play a strategic role in supporting companies as they move towards more interoperable and transparent models. Networks such as ConfBenefit can encourage not only the dissemination of good practice, but also the creation of shared languages, common governance models and forms of cooperation capable of reducing information asymmetries across the supply chain.
The DPP is not simply a technology applied to sustainability. It is a tool that helps make corporate purpose visible, documentable and verifiable over time. And it is probably here that a significant part of the competitiveness of European supply chains will be decided in the coming years: not merely in the ability to declare values, but in the ability to turn them into reliable, interoperable and shared data across the entire production ecosystem.
The transformation described in the previous sections, from declared sustainability to verifiable sustainability, from data fragmentation to structured governance, becomes tangible when we look at how companies in the fashion supply chain are addressing the journey towards the Digital Product Passport in practice.
The figures show the scale of the phenomenon. The global second-hand clothing market was worth 230 billion dollars in 2024, growing three times faster than the primary apparel market.
According to research by Bain & Company and eBay published in June 2025, the Digital Product Passport could double the life cycle value of a fashion product: a garment sold today for 500 pounds could generate a further 500 pounds in services and resale when supported by a digital passport, thanks to greater trust, traceability and easier access to the secondary market.
These figures overturn the perspective from which many companies still view the DPP: around 90% of brands continue to see it mainly as a regulatory burden, while the data suggests otherwise.
The critical issues described so far are already pushing many companies in the fashion supply chain to rethink how they manage product data and relationships with suppliers. This is the context in which the solutions developed by REMIRA Italia operate, with a focus on simplifying the collection and management of supply chain data and improving collaboration between companies and their supply chains.
Companies need guidance, not just a tool, and this is where the project becomes crucial in shifting from a mere regulatory requirement to a strategic asset.
One of the elements that has proved most effective in DPP compliance projects carried out by REMIRA is the ability to enable timely intervention throughout every stage of the product life cycle. From design to production and distribution, having up-to-date, structured information enables faster and more informed decisions.
Thanks to the centralisation of data in a cloud environment, potential issues, such as inconsistencies in materials, changes in composition or regulatory updates, can be identified and managed proactively, reducing risks and improving the overall quality of the final product.
It is also crucial to highlight the most critical obstacles to the adoption of DPP solutions.
In particular, this means the complexity of data collection, with information often dispersed across different actors in the supply chain.
The approach adopted to support REMIRA customers is to reuse as much data as possible that is already present in company systems, especially data relating to raw materials, fabrics, leather goods and accessories intended for production. This drastically reduces the need for manual input by suppliers, minimising errors and duplication.
Integration with existing systems also makes it possible to create a continuous and consistent flow of information, improving data quality and reliability.
One of the most recurring needs to emerge during compliance projects has been the need to make it easier to involve supply chain partners, who often differ widely in terms of tools and digital skills.
The ability to interact with the system in a simple, structured way, while keeping operational impact to a minimum, is a necessary condition for ensuring the quality and completeness of the data feeding the digital passport. This collaborative approach encourages greater participation across the entire supply chain, an essential element in building a complete DPP that complies with regulations.
A relevant operational element concerns the management of data carriers, supports such as QR codes or other digital identifiers that connect the product to its digital passport.
The ability to delegate the printing of care and composition labels directly to suppliers makes it possible to integrate the DPP from the earliest stages of production, ensuring faster operations, consistency in the information displayed, fewer intermediate steps and lower logistics costs. It is a function that ensures complete traceability from the point of origin.
One particularly significant example concerns an international brand based in Switzerland and operating globally, which adopted this approach to support the management of product data across its supply chain.
During the rollout phase, an unexpected element emerged: extremely positive feedback from suppliers. Compared with other platforms used within the same ecosystem for different brands, the solution was perceived as faster to learn and use, including by users with different levels of digital maturity, less invasive in relation to existing operational processes and able to significantly reduce the administrative burden.
Thanks to the reuse of existing data and the drastic reduction in manual data entry, suppliers were able to avoid redundant, low-value activities, with a direct impact on containing operating costs for both the brand and the supply chain.
The result was smoother, more effective collaboration, with less friction and greater alignment among all actors involved: a key factor not only for the quality of the data collected, but also for the long-term sustainability of the entire project.
Within the framework of European regulations on sustainability and the circular economy, the DPP is not just an obligation, but represents an opportunity to innovate business processes and relationships across the supply chain.
Through an approach focused on data quality, companies can not only meet regulatory requirements, but also enhance product information in order to improve transparency, commercial relationships and market positioning.
In this sense, the Digital Product Passport is not the answer to a regulatory obligation. It is the answer to a question that the most advanced supply chains are already asking: how to transform supply chain complexity from a source of risk into a source of demonstrable value.
If it were considered only as a new European regulatory requirement, the Digital Product Passport would lose much of its strategic significance. The challenge currently under way concerns the way companies build credibility, responsibility and trust across the supply chain.
Sustainability is gradually shifting from a mere declaration to the ongoing management of continuously updated information. Supply chain governance, digital infrastructures and organisational accountability therefore cease to be separate areas and become components of a single system.
For companies, the real challenge will therefore not only be adopting new technologies, but developing organisational models capable of integrating compliance, operational processes, supply chain relationships and data management.
From this point of view, the Digital Product Passport and Benefit Companies share the same direction: making sustainability not only declared, but demonstrable through data, processes and supply chain responsibility. Their stakeholder-oriented structure and the need to make common benefit verifiable make them naturally compatible with tools such as the Digital Product Passport.
But the DPP also makes clear a second element that is set to become increasingly relevant: no company can build transparency on its own. Data quality depends on collaboration between supply chain actors, the sharing of common standards and the ability to build reliable ecosystems.
It is probably here that a significant part of the competitiveness of European supply chains will be decided in the coming years: not only in the ability to generate value, but in the ability to make that value verifiable.
