From Certificates to Data Streams: Why Traceability Will Only Scale When Data Custody Becomes the Product
BUSINESS4 min read

From Certificates to Data Streams: Why Traceability Will Only Scale When Data Custody Becomes the Product

Next-Gen Textiles in Practice: How Sustainable Materials Can Scale While Meeting Traceability and Cost Standards
FROM THE EVENT Next-Gen Textiles in Practice: How Sustainable Materials Can Scale While Meeting Traceability and Cost Standards
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Sustainable textiles don’t fail at pilot scale because the materials aren’t promising. They fail because the industry can’t consistently prove what a product is, where it came from, and how it moved through a supply chain—at commercial speed and cost.

At Next-Gen Textiles in Practice, Diego Centurion (Senior Product Manager, Global Organic Textile Standard) captured the real shift underway with a phrase that reframes traceability entirely:

We are moving from “chain of custody” to “chain of data custody.”

That is not a software upgrade. It is a structural change in how textile value chains operate.

The Old Model: Static Proof in a Dynamic Supply Chain

Historically, traceability has relied on static artifacts: PDFs, certificates, audit reports, and transaction documents. Those tools were built for verification, but they weren’t built for scale—especially not in textile supply chains where:

  • Many commodities get blended (cotton + polyester + other fibers)

  • Value is added at every step (spinning, dyeing, finishing, sewing)

  • Data lives across many tiers and geographies

Shameek Ghosh (Co-Founder and CEO, TrusTrace) described the practical result: most brands don’t have visibility beyond Tier 1—and sometimes Tier 2—while the true chain can extend to Tier 6 or Tier 7.

In other words: the proof exists, but it’s fragmented.

The New Model: Digital Product Passports and “Streams of Events”

Centurion explained that digital product passports (DPPs) are designed to replace static proof with persistent identity and structured, shareable data.

A digital product passport—a structured digital record intended to carry product and supply-chain attributes across its lifecycle—will be required under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) (European Commission, 2024). Centurion noted that textiles are expected to be among the early priority groups, with product-specific rules likely following other categories such as batteries.

But the most important operational change isn’t the regulation—it’s the data architecture.

Centurion described the shift plainly:

  • From PDFs and certificates

  • To a stream of events—a structured timeline of what happened, where, and when, from fiber to garment

This is what “data custody” means: not simply that a product is certified, but that its data is consistently readable, transferable, and auditable across systems.

The Real Bottleneck: Standardization, Not Digitization

Both Centurion and Ghosh were blunt about what prevents scaling: interoperability.

Ghosh described the data challenge in human terms: even when brands connect systems, “they do not talk in the same language.” One dataset is formatted one way, another differently; IDs don’t match, terms don’t align, and semantics drift.

Centurion named the same friction more technically: harmonizing semantics and dealing with varying levels of SME readiness. SMEs—small and medium enterprises—often lack the digital maturity to adopt new workflows quickly, even when they want to comply.

The key takeaway is uncomfortable but clarifying:

Traceability doesn’t become an industry standard just because software exists.
It becomes a standard when the data model becomes standard.

Why Traceability and Circularity Don’t Always Pull in the Same Direction

Centurion also raised a nuance that sourcing teams will have to confront: traceability claims can break down when products are blended at scale.

If a batch of shirts contains cotton from multiple origins, a batch-level claim may be true. But a guarantee at the item level may not be.

That matters because circularity often pushes toward item-level serialization—tracking each item uniquely for second life, resale, repair, or recycling—while traceability claims are sometimes inherently probabilistic when blending occurs.

This doesn’t mean DPPs won’t work. It means the industry will need clarity about:

  • What can be claimed at batch level

  • What can be guaranteed at item level

  • What data is “good enough” for audit readiness

The Strategic Implication

Traceability will scale when it becomes operationally cheap and structurally normal:

  • Brands pay for platforms, lowering barriers for suppliers (as Ghosh noted is often the case today)

  • Standard bodies, auditors, and platforms converge on shared data definitions

  • SMEs gain tools and training to participate without massive overhead

  • Regulations force consistency and reduce optionality

The industry is not stuck because it lacks ambition.

It is stuck because it lacks shared infrastructure for proof.

Traceability will not become mainstream through more dashboards.

It will become mainstream when data custody becomes as standard as material custody.

Sources

  • European Commission (2024). Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR).