WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A PRODUCT COMES INTO YOUR BUSINESS

Scan it — single item or bulk — and the product's verified history comes up immediately: material composition, any Substances of Concern already flagged, prior repairs, prior owners in the circular chain. Nothing about this depends on the condition the item arrives in or what's printed on a label; it's read straight from the B2B RFID tag.

From there, every item gets assessed and routed toward its highest-value next life — resale-ready, repairable, a source of salvageable material for remanufacturing, or recycling feedstock. That routing decision, and everything you do next (resell, rent, repair, redesign, clean, or pass to a Producer Responsibility Organisation), becomes part of the product's permanent record - and one the Brand can use to show its regulatory compliance and its trusted circular story - making the EPR provider an important participant and to supporting a Brand in meeting their regulatory requirements.

See how the GCN App helps brands and value chain actors work together to meet emerging regulatory requirements at Compliance FAQs.

Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT) Directive (EU) 2024/825
The durability, repair information access point, spare parts availability period, and warranty duration fields we capture — when filled in and made visible on your Product ID — can contribute to meeting your obligation under the ECGT Directive (EU) 2024/825 to make this information available to consumers before purchase, in force from September 2026 with no company-size exemption. For explicit environmental claims, our Textile Certifications section — including EU Ecolabel and other recognised schemes — provides the kind of independently recognised backing the Directive requires to substantiate a claim. GCN does not track whether or when a consumer views this information; the Directive doesn't require that, and it isn't something we collect.

NEXT STEP AFTER EPR - BUILT FOR SORTERS AND RECYCLERS

Bulk-scan flags Substances of Concern automatically and certifies recycling feedstock at scale — this works the same way whether you're a small women's cluster group hand-sorting or a robotic sorting line processing thousands of items an hour. Sorting outcomes — resale market, reuse export, repair-and-clean, fibre-to-fibre recycling, downcycling, disposal — are recorded per batch, and cross-border movement is tracked as part of the record - see additional information below.

Facility credentials work the same way. Once you've verified an ISO 14001, ISO 45001, Fair Wear Foundation, SA8000, or equivalent worker-welfare certification, it travels with your facility profile — you're not re-proving it on every single transaction. And we encourage facilities to link to the independent free platform Open Supply Hub to support interoperability using location identifiers (OS IDs).  

NO CONSUMER DATA. EVER.

The moment a product reaches a consumer, its tag switches into Privacy Mode — no identity, no payment details, no personal data captured, ever. Only the product's own data keeps moving. That's a deliberate design decision, not a limitation: GCN is B2B, product-only infrastructure. What travels with a garment is information about the garment — nothing about who bought it.

THE LOOP CLOSES BACK TO THE BRAND

Every scanned item carries its own compliance-ready record — the kind of documentation a regulator or a brand partner can ask for, already assembled rather than reconstructed after the fact. And where you want to flag something back — a recurring defect, a material that's harder to process than expected, feedback that would help the next production run — that channel runs straight back to whichever brand issued the product's passport. Downstream operators aren't just an endpoint in GCN's network; they're a source of information brands don't currently get.

Bulk RFID sorting: detect and divert Substances of Concern at the point of sorting

We built this to solve one problem directly: giving a sorting operation the ability to know, the instant it matters, whether a Substance of Concern (SoC) is present in a batch of items — so it can be identified and removed right away, backed by live data captured at the point of scanning.

Point any authorised RFID reader — handheld or fixed — at a group of items, and every tag present is read together, in one pass. It's real hardware-level bulk reading, built identically across every reader we support. Any business or not-for-profit running a sorting or collection point can use the same detect-and-divert workflow, with the same evidence trail.

We built this for two reasons: it helps brands and sorting partners meet obligations like Article 11a of the revised EU Waste Framework Directive (see Compliance FAQs) — separate collection of textiles, in force since October 2025 — and to help detect and divert restricted substance before it moves further into the next material stream eg. fibre to fibre recycling or insulation. 

The mechanism:

1. Every item's SoC status — attested upstream by the Mill, Product Manufacturer, or Brand — is checked live, the instant it's scanned.

2. If anything in that batch is flagged, an on-screen alert fires immediately: "X of Y scanned items flagged — restricted substance present. Isolate before proceeding."

3. That alert is the trigger to open the batch and single-scan each item until the flagged product is identified and pulled out — from "somewhere in this batch" to "this specific item" in seconds.

4. The full record is captured automatically against a real batch identifier, so the quantity, facility, and per-item detail of every scan is an exact, verifiable fact. That record exports as a CSV report with the flag right at the top of the file, easy to see at a glance, and is also visible through the platform's regulator-facing view.

Second Detection: Workplace Contamination

The platform also allows for users to add alerts for contaminants that the product has come in contact with during its working life, exposure during use as a workwear or technical-textile item.

When a Downstream collector receives an item (eg. workwear take-back program or workwear-as-a-service), they can record a use-phase contamination observation directly — whether it came into contact with a contaminant, and what that substance was, if known.

Any Sorter who later bulk-scans a batch containing that item sees the same kind of immediate alert as an upstream-disclosed Substance of Concern — triggering the same isolate-and-divert step.

CLOSING OFF THE DPP

END-OF-LIFE PRODUCT DPP DOESN'T HAVE TO MEAN THE END

When a product genuinely reaches end-of-life, its record closes out with a documented pathway — reuse, recycling, or remanufacturing — and a chain of custody back through sorting. Working RFID tags can be used for the 'next product' through redesign or reset and reused/resold for another product that doesnt require the full washability. For bulk waste and by-product streams — offcuts, fibre blends, mixed-material batches — there's a separate batch-level record built for exactly that kind of volume.

END-OF-LIFE PRODUCT DPP DOESN'T HAVE TO MEAN THE END

When a product genuinely reaches end-of-life, its record closes out with a documented pathway — reuse, recycling, or remanufacturing — and a chain of custody back through sorting. But the RFID tag itself doesn't have to end there: where it's reusable, it can carry straight into whatever's made next, rather than every new product needing a brand-new tag from scratch. For bulk waste and by-product streams — offcuts, fibre blends, mixed-material batches — there's a separate batch-level record built for exactly that kind of volume.