Durability, Repair and End-of-Life: The Data Nobody Has Yet

Most passport fields describe the product as it was made: fibre composition, material suppliers, processing facilities, test evidence. A factory can, in principle, reconstruct all of it from records it already holds. Durability, repairability and end-of-life handling are different in kind.

These are statements about the future. How many washes a garment should withstand, whether it can be repaired, how it should be recycled or disposed of — none of these are recorded by the production process. They are asserted, which means someone in the organisation has to decide what the assertion is and accept responsibility for it.

This is where circularity preparation usually goes wrong. Factories wait for a specification, expecting the required fields to be handed down. But the specification will define what must be stated, not what the statement should say. The substantive work — testing, defining care expectations, deciding what end-of-life advice you are prepared to give for each material combination — has to happen inside the business regardless.

There is a practical middle path. You do not need a finished position on every material to start. Begin with the combinations that make up most of your volume, and for each establish three things: what testing evidence already exists, what care and repair guidance the brand or your own experience supports, and who owns the decision. Volume concentrates quickly — most factories find that a small number of constructions account for the majority of output.

Treating this as governance rather than data changes what you do next. It stops being a collection exercise and becomes a decision register: a short, owned list of statements the business is prepared to make, with the evidence behind each one and a named person responsible for keeping it current. That register is what a passport request will actually draw on.