Only 18% of fashion digital passport pilots support circularity

Just 18% of fashion digital product passport launches and pilots reviewed in a new report include features that support repair, resale or recycling. The finding comes from The State of Digital Product Passports 2026, published by Circular Fashion News and La Positive Society, and it lands at a moment when passport programmes are moving from experiment to expectation across the apparel supply chain.

The researchers behind the report analysed 93 fashion passport launches and pilots. That sample matters for sourcing teams: it is not a survey of intentions but a review of what brands have actually put into the market or into structured pilots. The headline result is stark. Fewer than one in five of the reviewed passports connect a garment to the services that extend its usable life.

Most of the passports examined instead concentrated on traceability or authentication. In practical terms, a typical passport in the sample tells a brand — and sometimes a regulator or a customer — where a product came from and whether it is genuine. It does not tell anyone how to fix it, where to send it for resale, or how to route it into a recycling stream.

That gap has commercial weight. Traceability data answers a compliance question. Circular features answer an end-of-life question. The first is increasingly mandated; the second is where resale value, repair economics and fibre recovery either get built in or get lost.

What does the 18% figure expose?

For suppliers and brands building passport infrastructure now, the report's data point is a benchmark. If 93 programmes were reviewed and fewer than a fifth carried circular functionality, then the industry's default passport build today is a compliance document, not a circularity tool.

The distinction will matter as passport requirements harden into law in major markets. Programmes designed only around authentication and chain-of-custody data may satisfy today's documentation demands while leaving brands to retrofit repair, resale and recycling connections later — a costlier exercise than designing them in from the start.

Where does the responsibility sit?

The report, published by Circular Fashion News together with La Positive Society, frames circularity as the missing layer in current passport deployments. Its reviewers found the industry clustering around two functions — tracing origins and verifying authenticity — while the services that would actually close the loop on a garment remain the exception.

For sourcing and compliance leaders, the decision the data forces is straightforward. Any passport roadmap drawn up this year should be tested against a single question: does the build include hooks to repair, resale and recycling partners, or does it stop at traceability? The sample of 93 suggests most currently stop short — and that the 18% doing otherwise are the early reference points for what regulators and resale channels will likely demand next.