The European Union (EU) is implementing digital passports from mid-2028, which is expected to create a major challenge for the Vietnamese garment industry in building the necessary data infrastructure.
The European Union (EU) has established a roadmap for enforcing the Digital Product Passport (DPP), making it a mandatory requirement for thousands of products, including garments entering its market.
Meanwhile, the digitalization of Vietnam’s textile and garment industry is still in its early stages, and so will be difficult for apparel manufacturers to meet the deadline.
“The 2028 milestone is less than two years away. Considering that we are starting from scratch, this is an extremely big challenge,” Dr. Tran Cong Chinh, a circular textile policy expert at the University of Economics said.
The Vietnamese textile and garment industry has not yet established systematic digital capabilities systems and an organizational digitalization framework.
The lack of common standards for supply chain data means that businesses are operating independently, lacking the synchronized connectivity needed to meet the demands of the international market.
“Pressure also comes directly from the changing EU consumer mindset, with 60% prioritizing sustainability over price and 40% actively seeking verified information about product origin,” Pham Thi Ngoc Tuyen, General Director of Hohenstein Vietnam Testing Laboratory also said.
“The structure of a digital passport requires absolute transparency regarding the product lifecycle,” Dien Dan reported.
Mandatory information to be provided includes product name, model, manufacturer, detailed production location, and fiber composition.
More importantly, the passport requires quantitative environmental indicators such as carbon footprint (CO2 balance), water consumption, and detailed guidance on the recyclability or disposal of the product upon decomposition.
This forces businesses to control data from the raw material level to the final product. To overcome the capacity gap, the textile and garment industry needs a unified action framework. Pham Thi Ngoc Tuyen proposed a six-step implementation roadmap.
These include, mapping data and assessing gaps to identify existing data; building an integrated IT infrastructure for large volumes of data; complying with chemical testing and REACH/CLP standards; connecting multi-tiered supply chains from T1 to T3; piloting DPP for certain product lines; scaling up and continuous improvement.
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