Twenty small and medium-sized textile companies in Argentina are testing digital product passports to trace chemicals in clothing, in a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) pilot showing how European-style transparency rules could work in the Global South.
UNEP is running the pilot with the Basel Convention Regional Center for South America. Participants span raw material producers, spinners, finishers, garment manufacturers and brands. The work falls under a Global Environment Facility-backed programme covering fashion and construction in eight countries, expected to keep 18,750 tonnes of hazardous chemicals out of supply chains.
Each product receives a digital file recording who made it, which materials and chemicals it contains, and how durable and recyclable it is. The project is building a data model of roughly 120 data points covering material composition, carbon footprint, chemical footprint and circularity indicators, alongside an open-source application programming interface that lets different passport platforms exchange information in a standard format.
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The design reflects the likely minimum requirements of the European Union’s textile digital product passport but is being stress-tested with Argentine firms to establish what data they can supply and which remains too difficult or costly.
UNEP says brands, recyclers and other players often lack basic knowledge of material composition, chemical use and environmental impacts, making informed circularity and chemicals management decisions difficult.
The pilot has exposed obstacles. Chemical information is often incomplete, and some certification schemes depend on testing laboratories that are scarce locally. Because third-party verification is expensive, companies may be left relying on self-declarations rather than verifiable chemical footprint data.
By defining a realistic baseline of chemical data that small firms can deliver today, the pilot is expected to clarify implementation costs and inform scale-up decisions in Argentina and beyond. It will feed recommendations for global and national policy instruments.