A Sustainable Product Tracking System under the Combination of Textile Label Regulations and Digital Product Passport

Xuejie Zhao

Article
2026 / Volume 9 / Pages 1234-1253
Received 14 October 2025; Accepted 17 November 2025; Published 28 April 2026
https://doi.org/10.31881/TLR.2026.1234

Abstract
The global textile and apparel industry faces critical challenges in supply chain transparency and substantiating sustainability claims. Conventional textile labeling, while mandated to disclose fiber composition and origin, offers only static data that is inadequate for tracking complex manufacturing processes or verifying environmental performance. The European Union’s forthcoming Digital Product Passport (DPP) is set to create a dynamic, data-rich digital record for textile products. This paper addresses the crucial challenge of ensuring data integrity and validity for textile product attributes such as fiber traceability, chemical usage, and circularity data. We propose and evaluate a sustainable product tracking system that integrates labeling regulations with the DPP, underpinned by a permissioned blockchain architecture. To validate the framework’s feasibility and efficacy, we developed a prototype system based on Hyperledger Fabric and conducted performance evaluations and a case study. The system’s architecture is designed to ensure immutable tracking throughout the textile supply chain. Through an end-to-end tracking experiment of an organic cotton garment from raw fiber to finished apparel, the prototype demonstrated a transaction latency of approximately 3.2 seconds and a stable throughput of over 45 TPS under realistic network constraints, proving its technical viability. The analysis confirms that leveraging blockchain as the data backbone for the DPP provides a verifiable and immutable record, effectively combating greenwashing and fostering a circular economy for textiles and apparel.

Keywords
digital product passport, blockchain, textile industry, fiber traceability, apparel manufacturing