The circularity.ID® is a digital information carrier containing the story of a product, along with essential material & product data to enable a holistic circular system for your company.
The integration of the circularity.ID® into a brand’s products will:
Increase transparency of sustainability efforts
Increase customer engagement and loyalty long after the point of sale
Provide data to facilitate circular business models such as resale, rental, and recycling at end-of-life
The circularity.ID® includes the following features:
To power circular practices, crucial material- and product-specific data is saved in a defined format and made accessible to stakeholders via the product identifier at each consecutive stage of a product’s lifecycle. The circularity data includes immutable data such as material and chemical composition, and mutable data such as product images, description, sustainability consumer information, and service offers. Over six years of research, pilots, and collaborative stakeholder dialogue have been leveraged to develop the circularity.ID® data standard.
The product identifier is integrated into a garment holding the circularity data. It can come in different technologies depending on the purpose of use. For consumer engagement and transparency purposes, QR and NFC are scannable via smartphone. To enable a reverse supply chain of sorting and recycling with a large-scale partner using automated fibre sorting, RFID or NFC is needed.
When the circularity.ID® is scanned, the consumer-facing digital product site opens up. This site contains a garment’s full story, from insights on material components, their origin and production, to manufacturing countries, care instructions, strategies for prolonging use, and instructions on how to return the piece for reuse, resell or recycling. It comes either in a standard design or as a white label solution.
The circularity.ID® enables circular services in the reverse supply chain to be used for the optimal end-of-use scenario for your products. Through the circularity.ID®, you gain access to the full circular.fashion reverse supply chain network, and you can set up your ideal system for the take-back, sorting, recommerce, and fibre recycling of your brand's products.
We’re excited to offer our customers a collection designed with circularity principles in mind and testing an end-to-end solution that goes beyond circular design. With this pilot project, we will gather learnings on how customers value this additional level of product transparency and how it can help them extend the life of their garments.
Kate HeinyDirector Sustainability Zalando SE
circularity.ID®
Enabling the change towards data-driven circularity in fashion.
