Pangaia, a sustainable clothing brand, has collaborated with Eon, a traceability solutions provider, to power “digital passports” for its products as part of its initiatives to improve transparency, traceability, and circularity.

The digital passports, which are powered by a QR code and a cloud-hosted digital twin, are printed directly onto Pangaia care labels and collect details on each garment's individual journey.

Customers can access product-level reporting through a customized digital experience that can be accessed by scanning the QR code on the package. Consumers are taken on a trip from the product's origin to its purchase, transportation, and aftercare, which includes provenance details and a map of the manufacturing and distribution facilities.

Pangaia will be able to update its customers in real-time as the scope of its impact reporting expands thanks to the digitized product experience. For example, carbon and water effect data could be applied retrospectively to a digital passport if the results of a complete "life cycle evaluation" (LCA) weren't yet available at the time of procurement. 

Pangaia is currently on track to complete LCAs on 80% of its goods by 2022. Pangaia believes that by making lifecycle details and aftercare advice more visible, consumers will be encouraged to prolong the longevity of their products and keep them in circulation longer.

Chief Impact Officer at Pangaia, Maria Srivastava, said they believe it is important that knowledge about where and how Pangaia goods are produced is easily available and engaging. Taking inspiration from social media, their new digital passports place customized details around traceability and sustainability at their customers' fingertips in a fun and engaging way, empowering them to make the best possible decisions.

She adds they conclude that product digitization is critical to pushing market transformation and accelerating an Earth Positive future — one that brings back more than it takes — in addition to assisting them on their own circularity journey.

The digital passports will be available for the first time on Pangaia's Horizon t-shift collection, which will launch on May 13, 2021. Product landing pages will have dedicated icons and messaging to raise customer awareness of the product digitization, as well as dedicated emails to promote user acceptance, in addition to the care label incorporation. On a bi-monthly basis, Pangaia expects to carry out wireless passports in phases through its other product lines.

Pangaia's investment in digital passports coincides with the company's latest initiative to increase clarity about its customers' effect by launching the Climate Positive product on its website.

At the time of purchase, products are marked by an icon and a pop-up describing the verified carbon offsetting systems that can be used to offset their carbon footprint. This is a redesign of the company's existing lifecycle assessment widgets, which show real-time reductions in carbon, water, and pesticides as compared to a conventionally manufactured commodity from a different brand.

Pangaia's digital passports will also make use of EON's CircularID Protocol, which was created to help circular resale, recycle, and sorting partners gain access to the data they need to locate, steward, and handle goods and resources as they move from one product lifecycle to the next.