EU research project to sustainably transform textile industry

How can we make chemicals in products easier to trace and in this way move closer to a climate-neutral and resource-efficient circular economy? This is the question at the heart of the “ECHT” project led by Jonas Rehn-Groenendijk from the Innovation and Transformation Platform for Sustainable Development at h_da. Against the backdrop of the European Green Deal and the introduction of the Digital Product Passport, the aim is to set a transformation in motion in close collaboration with companies from the textile industry. The project’s interim results bode well.

By Alexandra Welsch, 16.7.2025

Let’s start by looking into the crystal ball. How far will we have come by 2040 towards achieving the EU target of making the chemical content of textile products traceable? Researchers in the ECHT project have developed two probable scenarios in response to this question. The first scenario: chemical traceability continues to be lost in the Bermuda Triangle of consumer ignorance, industry’s unwillingness and a lack of political ambition. The second scenario: the success story of an industry that is on the right track and earning money with it. Under h_da’s guidance, companies taking part in the European research project are examining which vision of the future is more probable and how the second scenario could become reality.

Things have started to happen. As part of the European Green Deal, the EU is endeavouring to lower climate-damaging carbon emissions to zero in the foreseeable future. One of the levers for achieving this is to reduce the large amount of waste produced by industry and increase the percentage of materials recycled – towards a circular economy that is climate-neutral, resource-efficient and pollutant-free. One of the key instruments here is the Digital Product Passport (DPP) with information on the materials and contents of goods, which companies will in future be obliged to present.

“Our research project pre-empts something that will soon become mandatory,” says law professor Martin Führ, who is responsible for the project with a dozen partners from five European countries, describing the status quo. ECHT is the acronym for “Enable Digital Product Passports with Chemicals Traceability for a Circular Economy”, and facilitating the implementation of the product passport has met with a willingness to change among the participating companies. Not least for sales reasons. “No data, no market” is the motto for the future, interjects Führ. Those who are better than others as far as transparency is concerned create trust in their supply chains and win their customers’ trust as well.

“Companies are obliged to take action,” says Jonas Rehn-Groenendijk. He is the project manager for ECHT und is supported by design strategist Jessica Krejci, who is employed as a research assistant in the department. The project will last three years and has been awarded €2m in funding from the “Interreg North-West Europe” programme and the EU. But the lack of transparency, the complexity and established supply chain structures make it difficult, he says, for companies to determine what chemicals their products contain. The aim is to help them establish chemical traceability and upgrade their networks, innovation and competitiveness. Because the textile and flooring industry is already obliged to introduce the product passport by 2027-2028, there are plenty of interested companies from these two sectors on board – including global players such as H&M and Puma. Also among the 20 stakeholders, however, are the German Environment Agency, NGOs and a recycling firm. “Our project work is transdisciplinary,” says Rehn-Groenendijk, whose background is in design research.

The project is not concerned with developing product passports. Instead, the aim is to empower companies to adjust their mindset in this direction. “To look beyond their own horizons and work outside their habitual thinking patterns,” says Rehn-Groenendijk, putting it in a nutshell. In the sense of transformative research, it is about “a need for a change in mentality among all stakeholders.” To this end, they developed processes and formats together in an experimental setting aimed at stimulating transformation. “ECHT is geared towards industry and wants to support it.”

As far as the methodology is concerned, direct exchange plays a central role, which is fostered above all in joint workshops. This is how the participants identified, in a first step, 16 factors that can have an impact on chemical traceability. Examples are the regulatory framework in certain countries, partnerships along a supply chain, consumer behaviour or the general public. In the next step, the team applied what is known as the scenario technique, a method for foresight analysis and strategic planning developed by Geschka & Partner, a corporate consulting firm based in Darmstadt.

With the help of corresponding analysis software, the researchers related these 16 individual factors to each other and weighted them, particularly vis-à-vis their interdependencies. For example: If the influencing factor “regulatory framework” is tightened or relaxed, to what extent does this have a greater or lesser effect on the factors “consumer behaviour” or “general public”? “The software creates matches,” explains Rehn-Groenendijk, “that is, sets of realistic influencing factors that trigger changes and are coherent.” From the future scenarios resulting from this process, those two were then selected that seemed particularly coherent and realistic on the basis of the analysis. Moreover, an additional vote among the participants produced an interesting result: they declared themselves unanimously in favour of the progressive scenario, in which the implementation of chemical traceability becomes a success story.

In their pursuit of greater transparency and sustainability, the participants in the ECHT project have already gone a few steps further. For example, in three workshops they jointly developed a traceability strategy which is now forming the basis for action plans. “What’s exciting about it is the constructive discussion,” highlights Jonas Rehn-Groenendijk. “A lot is negotiated in dialogue.” In a fun way too. In the business game “Trace it”, for example, which was specially developed, representatives of a sportswear company and an environmental association sat at a table and together deliberated how they could implement traceability strategies.

A “Policy Action Plan” is also in the making. In conjunction with this, a meeting was held in Brussels last autumn with an extended circle of over 50 stakeholders, including representatives from BASF and the European Commission. “We thought about what message we want to send in the direction of the political decision-makers,” says Rehn-Groenendijk. Furthermore, the aim is to have a broader impact, beyond the ECHT participants, via a knowledge platform. To reproduce findings and information generated during the process, a chatbot was developed.

Will the ECHT project help to make Europe more climate-friendly? At this point in time, looking into the crystal ball would probably be inopportune. But effects are already discernible. “A certain momentum is developing,” says Martin Führ. Even just dealing with the different scenarios has set a transformation process in motion, he says, because people are not getting bogged down in the trenches of lobbying. “I presume that the legal framework behind it will propel the process anyway,” he adds. “And for companies that raises the question of whether they want to run along behind or actively lead the way.”