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Purpose and Overview

The Textiles Extension of the United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTTP) aims to address the unique challenges of traceability, transparency, and sustainability in global textile and apparel value chains.

The textile sector spans a wide range of actors—from raw material producers (such as cotton and wool growers) to spinners, weavers, dyers, garment manufacturers, brands, and retailers. The sector faces increasing demands from regulators, consumers, and industry partners to provide verifiable information about origin, production practices, labor conditions, and environmental impacts.

The Textiles Extension provides a shared data language and protocol framework to enable trusted exchange of product and process information across these diverse stakeholders. By adopting a standardized approach, it reduces fragmentation, prevents duplication, and ensures that claims can be independently validated across organizational and geographic boundaries.

Overview​

The Textiles Extension builds upon the core UNTP specification while introducing data structures, processes, and guidance specific to textile supply chains. It is designed to be interoperable with existing international standards and initiatives, while also flexible enough to accommodate sector-specific needs such as:

  • Raw material traceability (e.g., cotton, wool, recycled fibers, synthetic materials).
  • Transformation tracking (spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, and garment manufacturing).
  • Sustainability and compliance indicators (chemical use, water consumption, labor and social compliance, certifications).
  • Circularity and end-of-life practices (reuse, recycling, and disposal pathways).

By applying a protocol-driven approach, the Textiles Extension supports:

  • Data discovery and access – ensuring that textile product information can be located, retrieved, and verified across organizational systems.
  • Interoperability – enabling textile data to integrate with other UNTP extensions (e.g., agriculture, food, or plastics) for multi-sector traceability.
  • Trust and accountability – ensuring that data exchanged between supply chain actors is verifiable, tamper-resistant, and anchored in recognized identifiers and credentials.
  • Regulatory alignment – supporting emerging global regulations, such as digital product passports in the EU, due diligence laws, and extended producer responsibility schemes.

Intended Audience​

This extension is designed for:

  • Industry stakeholders across the textile and apparel value chain (growers, processors, manufacturers, brands, retailers).
  • Solution providers building systems for supply chain traceability and sustainability reporting.
  • Regulators and policymakers seeking harmonized mechanisms for data collection and compliance verification.
  • Civil society and consumers interested in credible, standardized information about textile products and their impacts.

Benefits​

Adoption of the Textiles Extension will:

  • Reduce costs and complexity of compliance through harmonized data exchange.
  • Improve transparency and trust between partners in global textile value chains.
  • Support sustainability objectives by enabling measurement and verification of environmental and social impacts.
  • Facilitate innovation in circular textiles, including recycled fibers and closed-loop production systems.

Understanding Implementation​

To see how the Textiles Extension addresses real-world supply chain scenarios, explore the Use Cases section. These use cases demonstrate how UNTP constructs (facility records, conformity credentials, product passports, traceability events, etc.) are used to solve common challenges in textile supply chains, such as chain-of-custody tracking and interoperability with different identifier schemes.