Today, fragmented, unreliable, and inconsistent environmental data limits transparency, creates business inefficiencies, erodes consumer trust, and prevents informed purchasing decisions. Relevant information is dispersed across many actors. This also limits the information needed for circularity and sustainability transitions.
The UNEP Digital Product Information Systems (DPIS) work provides a blueprint for how digital product information systems can work together globally to address these problems. It sets out common principles for governance, sustainability information, interoperability and standards, helping countries and sectors develop compatible and aligned systems.
To test DPIS in practice, UNEP launched the Argentina textiles Digital Product Information System pilot with the Basel Convention Regional Center for South America and 20 textile SMEs across the value chain, putting digital product passports into practice in a real-world Global South context. It was launched to address data asymmetries along the textile value chain—where brands, recyclers, and other actors typically lack basic information on material composition, chemical use, and environmental impacts—making informed decisions on circularity and chemicals management impossible.
Key technical aspects of the pilot include:
- Development of a data model featuring approximately 120 data points covering material composition, carbon footprint, chemical footprint, and other environmental and circularity indicators.
In the Argentina pilot, the data model is the agreed “blueprint” for what information each product passport must contain and how it is structured. It defines the list of data fields (for example, materials, chemicals, environmental indicators, durability, company details), how they are grouped, and which ones are mandatory or optional, so that all actors in the value chain collect and share comparable information. - Creation of an open-source API (Application Programming Interface) to support interoperability between solution providers.
In this pilot, an open-source API is a common digital “connector” that allows different tools and platforms to automatically exchange product information (e.g. materials, chemicals, environmental data) in a standardized way. It makes sure that when one system sends data, other systems can reliably read and use it, supporting interoperability between Digital Product Passport solutions.
Therefore, by co-designing a common data model and open-source API, aligned with the expected EU Textile DPP requirements but tested for feasibility with Argentine SMEs, the pilot aims to demonstrate how standardized, interoperable product-level data can support traceability, circularity, and sustainability in practice, and to generate concrete evidence on which data points are realistically deliverable under current market and infrastructure conditions.
In short, this pilot will inform what a data model for textiles should look like to drive circularity and sustainability data exchange while ensuring business feasibility. It will help clarify the practical costs and burdens of implementation to inform future scale-up decisions for DPIS—in Argentina and beyond. It will also recommend global and national policy instruments for designing and implementing DPIS.
Testing digital passports for clothes
The Argentina pilot project is testing a “digital passport” for clothing, similar to what the EU plans to require in the future. Each product receives a digital file that brings together key information: who made it, what materials and chemicals it contains, and how durable and recyclable it is. Working with 20 small and medium-sized textile companies in Argentina, the project assesses which information they can realistically provide and what remains too difficult or costly. This helps demonstrate how EU-style digital product passports could work in practice outside Europe and what support companies need to make textiles safer, more transparent, and more sustainable.
UNEP highlighted that the pilot is facing and actively addressing barriers in chemical data exchange, including incomplete information and a lack of testing labs needed for some certification schemes. There is ongoing discussion about whether companies can provide reliable evidence or must rely on self-declarations because third-party verification is too expensive.
By combining likely EU Textile DPP minimum requirements with additional lifecycle- and chemical-related attributes, and then stress-testing these with real companies, the pilot helps identify a “minimum realistic floor” of chemical data SMEs can provide today and clarifies where policy, regulatory design, and capacity-building (including testing infrastructure) are needed to reach a more ambitious level of chemical transparency and footprinting.
The Argentina textiles pilot provides concrete evidence on how chemical transparency can be operationalized in practice, especially for SMEs in a Global South context. It reveals persistent data asymmetries on chemicals used upstream, meaning many SMEs and recyclers lack reliable information on substances present in products, which directly constrains safe circularity and sound chemicals management. Even where the DPP clearly defines chemical and environmental indicators, implementation is limited by a verification gap: high third-party verification costs and the lack of local testing laboratories often reduce companies to self-declarations rather than verifiable chemical footprint data.
