Swedish scout association pilots digital product passports

The Swedish scout association is not the kind of organisation you might think of as a pioneer in the digital product passports area. But that’s exactly what they are. As a non-profit youth organisation with over 80,000 members spread across Sweden and focusing on learning by doing in the out of doors, the scouts have always had a strong sustainability profile. Now, they’ve taken the next step in piloting digital product passports for the 100 products they sell online. Together with Kolla, they began by creating a template for every DPP in line with the scouts brand look and feel. The next step was to look at what data was required from an EU-perspective and then look at what else could be inserted to add value to users. “For our shirts page for example, we have a direct link to our badges guide as this is useful information for scouts,” says Julia Aronsson, head of e-commerce at the Swedish scout association.

“But we really like the integration with our second-hand platform in particular,” she adds.

Second-hand sales to grow

The scout shirt is something that has traditionally been re-sold in scout halls around the country. In recent years, the scouts have started using the Revive Retail online platform to create a digital second-hand market for their shirts. People visiting the scouts webshop can now click on a ‘second-hand’ button to buy pre-loved shirts. Kolla then integrated with the same platform to make it possible to scan a digital product passport, click ‘second-hand’ and automatically put the shirt up for sale on the platform. “This should make it even easier to sell a product second-hand. It’s just a couple of clicks away. The seller just needs to describe what condition the shirt is in and the rest of the info gets uploaded automatically since it’s already in the digital product passport,” says Aronsson. “We really like this case as it shows how a DPP can accelerate the transition to a circular economy for real. Commercial brands will be able to make it easy for customers to sell their products second-hand and at the same time, generate revenues. When a brand can make money on doing the right thing, then everyone wins,” says Colm O’Callaghan, Managing Director at Kolla. How it works The DPP pilot is effectively an integration with the information and data the scouts have on their e-commerce platform, Magento and the Kolla platform. Once the Kolla template was set, the next step was connecting the relevant data from Magento so that it automatically updated into individual digital product passports for every product. It means that the passports could be created automatically and if data needs to change, then the scouts just change that in Magento and the rest updates automatically. The DPP pilot did bring up a series of issues which the scouts see as valuable insights. “Once we did the pilot, we could see how important it was to organise product data. For example, we needed to add new data into Magento to make this work. We also could see what information we didn’t have and this was also very useful,” says Aronsson

The scouts have put QR-codes on one of their products so far, linking to the digital product passports. Later in 2026, the EU is expected to come out with clear guidelines (the so-called ‘delegated acts’) and the scouts await this development before taking further steps.