A platform for sustainable sourcing in fashion is piloting an online library of textile suppliers, each equipped with a digital product passport (DPP) that should reflect the origin, nature and environmental impact of each material.
World Collective said in a statement today that it built the DPP library in partnership with Kinset, a green tech company that helps brands navigate their sustainability compliance requirement.
While the law that legislated the DPP is already in force, the rules specific to the textile industry are only slated to be finalized in 2027, with the full implementation expected sometime in 2028.
“World Collective and Kinset acknowledge that the DPP regulation is still being finalized, and not every requirement has been defined yet. The library is built with that reality in mind,” the statement read.
The library, which is already live, provides fashion brands with a glimpse of who and what are already ready to comply: nine textiles, all from three companies. In comparison, World Collective has nearly 600 materials on its site.
The small pool of suppliers only underscores how difficult it is to be DPP-ready, let alone for rules that have not yet fully taken shape.
When asked to explain why only a few materials are on the library for now, World Collective CEO Jeanine Ballone told Sourcing Journal that “everyone is still in pilot mode,” may it be regulators, certification bodies or the suppliers.
“Getting a material to DPP-ready is hard work. We selected a first group of suppliers to go through the full verification journey with us, and now it is a matter of scaling that across the rest of our library,” she said.
“We trust the materials on our platform, and we trust the suppliers behind them, but if this were easy, the entire industry wouldn’t be trying to solve it through a dozen different routes at once,” she added.
