Final ECHT Dissemination Event – Enable Digital Product Passports with Chemicals Traceability for a Circular Economy

On behalf of the transdisciplinary ECHT project consortium, we cordially invite you to the final dissemination event marking the conclusion of this Interreg North-West Europe funded project (2024–2026).

Over the past three years, ECHT has addressed a pressing challenge at the intersection of environmental policy and industrial practice: how to enable chemical traceability across the textile clothing value chains as a precondition for a genuinely circular economy. With the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and the forthcoming Digital Product Passport (DPP) placing textiles among the first product groups subject to mandatory sustainability disclosure, the question of how value chain actors — particularly the micro and small-to-medium enterprises — can gain reliable access to material and chemical composition data has become both urgent and complex.

This closing event offers an opportunity to engage substantively with the outcomes of this work and with the broader research and policy context in which it is situated.

Highlights of the Event

• Presentation of Project Outcomes: we will present the ECHT traceability strategy, including the three action plans developed for clothing and flooring value chain actors and for policymakers, comprehensive capacity building programme with actionable tools and templates as well as the ECHT Knowledge Platform as the central access point for outputs and insights of the project and beyond.
• Applied Training session: in addition to presenting findings, we will conduct a hands-on training session on selected tools arising from the project's capacity-building activities, offering participants direct engagement with instruments intended for practical application in industry and policy contexts.
• Contribution from related Research Project: to situate ECHT's findings within a wider research landscape, related research projects will present their work, allowing for identification of complementary approaches and potential synergies.
• Panel discussion - Outlook beyond ECHT: he event will conclude with a panel discussion examining the trajectory of chemical traceability and Digital Product Passports beyond the project's conclusion — the regulatory developments still to come, the practical obstacles to implementation at scale, and the research and policy priorities that should follow. We invite representatives from research, industry, and policy to contribute to this discussion, and welcome active participation from all attendees.
• Target audience: this event addresses industry practitioners, policymakers, researchers and representatives of textile and circular economy value chains across the North-West Europe region and beyond, as well as anyone with a professional or academic interest in sustainable product policy and chemical traceability.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exchange on the state and future of chemical traceability in the textile sector.

To conclude the day, participants are warmly invited to join a networking drink, offering a relaxed opportunity to continue discussions.