Textile circularity has a vocabulary problem. The same word carries a legal meaning in one document, a marketing meaning in the next, and no meaning at all in the third. "Verified" is the worst offender, but "traced", "certified" and "confidence" are not far behind.
This matters more than it sounds, because vague words are load bearing. A claim that would fail if stated precisely often survives when stated loosely, and the imprecision is what carries it from a supplier declaration to a garment label without anyone noticing the gap it crossed.
These are the definitions we work to. Where a term has an established meaning in a standard, we use that meaning. Where it does not, we say what we mean, so that a reader can disagree with us precisely.
The record
Verified item record
A structured record about one physical item whose values have been reconciled across several independent sources, with a link from each value back to the document it was derived from and a confidence attached to it. It is a reconciliation, not a transcription.
Commonly misused for any record that came out of an automated system. Reading one document and storing what it said is extraction, not verification. Verification requires more than one source and a recorded outcome when they disagree.
Item level data
Data that describes one physical item rather than a product line, a batch or a shipment. It is the resolution at which a Digital Product Passport, a resale listing and a routing decision all operate.
Batch level data presented per item is not item level data. If two garments in the same bale must necessarily carry the same value, the value describes the bale.
Provenance
The record of where a piece of information came from: which source produced it, through which activity, at what time. Provenance describes the origin of a claim, not the origin of the material.
Frequently confused with origin. A garment's provenance in this sense is the trail behind the assertion that it was made in Portugal, not the fact of Portugal.
Chain of evidence
The unbroken set of links from a stated value back through every intermediate step to the source documents that support it. A chain of evidence is intact when any single value can be traced to its origin without a manual reconstruction.
Distinct from chain of custody. Chain of custody follows the material. Chain of evidence follows the claim about the material. A shipment can have one without the other.
Evidence layer
The system that sits between physical material and the claims made about it, originating records where the material is and making every downstream assertion traceable to a source. It is infrastructure rather than a report.
The distinction from a reporting tool is where the data comes from. A reporting tool consumes data someone else produced. An evidence layer produces it at the point of handling.
Confidence and review
Calibrated confidence
A score whose value matches the observed rate of being correct, so that fields scored 0.9 are right about nine times in ten across a large sample. It is a measured property of a scoring system, checked against held out data, not an expression of how certain anyone feels.
An uncalibrated score is worse than no score, because it invites thresholds that do not mean what the operator thinks they mean. If a system reports confidence, ask what it was calibrated against and how often that is rechecked.
Auto route threshold
The confidence level above which an item is routed without human review. It is a business decision about acceptable error, set by the operator against the cost of a wrong fraction, and it belongs to the operator rather than to the system.
A vendor who sets this for you has made a risk decision on your behalf. Raising the threshold routes fewer items automatically and sends more to review. That trade is the whole design.
Assisted review
The handling of items that fall below the auto route threshold, where a person sees the item, the source document and what the system read, and makes the decision. On a sorting line the system narrows the question rather than answering it.
Not the same as a manual fallback. A fallback implies the system failed. Assisted review is the designed path for the items where human judgement is worth its cost, identified before the decision rather than after.
Normalization
Mapping values as they appear on a source document into a controlled vocabulary, so that equivalent statements in different languages, abbreviations or formats resolve to the same field value.
Normalization is lossy by design, which is why the original text has to be retained alongside the normalized value. A record that keeps only the normalized form cannot be audited against its source.
Custody and claims
Chain of custody
The documented sequence of parties that held material between its origin and its current location, together with the model under which claims travel along that sequence.
The phrase is often used as if it were self explanatory. It is not: a chain of custody claim means very different things depending on whether segregation or mass balance was used.
Segregation
A custody model in which certified material is kept physically separate from other material throughout processing, so that the finished item is the material the claim describes.
The strongest model and the most expensive. It is also the only one where pointing at a specific item and repeating the claim is defensible.
Mass balance
A custody model in which certified and uncertified material are processed together and a ledger allocates the certified share to a proportion of the output. The claim describes a system over a period, not any particular item.
Not a weaker version of segregation but a different assertion. Applying a mass balance claim to a single garment is a category error, and it is a common one.
Conformance
A record satisfying a stated set of constraints: required fields present, values drawn from the permitted vocabulary, relationships between fields holding. Conformance is checkable automatically, at the moment a record arrives, by a machine that did not write it.
A record that parses is not a record that conforms. Parsing means the syntax was valid; conformance means the content satisfies the rules.
Certification
A third party attesting, after an audit, that an organisation followed a defined procedure during a defined period. Certification is a statement about a process at a point in time, made by an accredited body.
The distinction from conformance is the whole point. Certification says an auditor was satisfied on the day. Conformance says this record satisfies these constraints right now. They answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other.
Material outcomes
Fiber to fiber recycling
Recovering material from a textile and returning it to a textile of comparable value. It is the outcome the circularity language assumes, and less than 1% of textiles currently reach it.
Often used loosely for any recycling of a textile. If the output is insulation, wiping cloth or filler, the correct word is downcycling.
Downcycling
Recovering material from a textile into an application of lower value from which no further recovery is realistic. It keeps material out of incineration for one further cycle rather than returning it to circulation.
Not a failure state, and often the honest destination for degraded material. It becomes a problem only when it is reported as recycling without qualification.
Recycled content claim
An assertion that a stated proportion of a product's material was recovered rather than made from virgin feedstock. Because recycled and virgin polymers can be chemically identical, the claim rests on documentation rather than on measurement of the material.
Under EmpCo, Directive (EU) 2024/825, an unsubstantiated version of this claim is prohibited from 27 September 2026. Substantiation means evidence tied to the product, not a certificate carried forward.
Passports
Digital Product Passport
A structured, machine readable record attached to an individual product and reachable through a data carrier on it, created under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1781.
Not a QR code. The carrier is the least interesting part; the obligation is the data behind it and the standards that make it resolvable and checkable.
Passport access tiers
The split of passport data into a public tier readable by anyone who scans the item, and a restricted tier available only to credentialed parties such as authorities and recyclers.
The tiers are why a passport can carry commercially sensitive evidence at all. A design that puts everything in the public tier will not be implemented, and one that puts everything in the restricted tier is not a passport.