Impact and Responsibility Statement2025–26

The group comprises two entities, each registered in England and Wales at Porton Science Park, Porton Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire:

• Symolem Limited provides sustainability advisory, policy and consultancy services, translating regulation, including the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and its Digital Product Passport requirements, into actionable roadmaps for brands, retailers and institutions.
• Symolem-ID Ltd is building verification infrastructure for Digital Product Passports in retail, founded in February 2026 by Lavinia Fernandes as Chief Executive Officer and Artur Synowiec as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.

The two entities operate independently of one another by design. Advisory work is not shaped by platform commercial interests, and the platform is not captured by any single client relationship. This separation is described further on the Governance and Disclosures page.

The advisory practice consolidated its methodology and grew its output substantially this year.

• In April 2026 the group moved into offices at Porton Science Park near Salisbury, giving both entities a physical base within one of Wiltshire's leading science and innovation campuses.
• We expanded beyond a sole practitioner model, onboarding our first associate consultant during the year and building the operational infrastructure to support a growing advisory team. As this draft goes to press, ten sustainability consultants are being onboarded to begin work on 1 August 2026, the practice's most significant expansion to date.
• We formalised the START methodology (Standards, Transparency, Accountability, Responsibility, Transition) as the structure for our advisory services, and mapped the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation to it article by article for client use.
• We developed and published the Symolem 6M Model, which maps a garment's whole life across six factors: Materials, Manufacturing, Magnitude, Maintenance, Markets and Methane, each carried in a single Digital Product Passport shared between brands and retailers. The 6M Model now anchors the practice's circularity services and complements the START methodology, naming what a circular textile economy must get right while START describes how to build it.
• We continued to develop the practice's proprietary frameworks, including the HIE (Human Impact Equivalence) Framework for quantifying social impact and the Four I's framework (Identity, Integrity, Intelligence and Impact).
• We published white papers and reference documents on the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and Digital Product Passport readiness, and launched Board Material, a weekly newsletter for senior leaders on product regulation and transparency.

Symolem-ID was incorporated in February 2026 and moved quickly from concept to working product.

• We built and iterated the Signal platform, a Digital Product Passport verification environment for retailers, developed in close collaboration with early demo customers.
• We developed the Fashion Intelligence Graph (FIG), a data model of 814 fields across 36 domains, as the platform's underlying field register, aligned with the United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP).
• The company is raising at pre-seed stage, with Artur Synowiec confirmed as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer during the year.
• Symolem-ID will launch publicly on 1 September 2026, the day after this financial year closes, and will open its pre-seed investment round at launch. This statement has been pre-released in part so that the group's governance and impact record is on the public record ahead of that date.
• Product development was timed around the launch of the EU Digital Product Passport Registry in July 2026, positioning the platform for the first regulated product categories under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.
• In July 2026, following the entry of Compare Ethics Ltd into creditors' voluntary liquidation in June 2026, Symolem-ID made an offer to the appointed liquidators, Cooper Parry, to acquire certain of the company's assets. At the date of this statement the offer is pending and no transaction has completed; the outcome will be reported in next year's statement.

In November 2025, Symolem won a place on the prestigious Digital Catapult Black Founders Programme, a competitive programme supported by Channel 4 and Sony Music Entertainment. Symolem-ID is a direct result of the programme: the platform concept was developed and stress-tested through it, and the company was incorporated three months after the programme began. The founder is also an alumna of the Digital Catapult 3.0 Accelerator, and the group continued to engage with Digital Catapult programmes during the year.

• Together with our academic in residence, Dr Vinayak Sharma of the University of Exeter, we submitted a paper to the IVI Summit, the annual conference of the Innovation Value Institute.
• We are creating a consortium with Maynooth University for a Horizon Europe project. The application had not concluded at the date of this statement, and we report it as in formation rather than as an outcome.
• During the year the group received letters of support from our Member of Parliament, from the United Nations, and from the Salisbury Chamber of Commerce.
• The group's professional associations reflect its position across trade, circularity and standards. Symolem is a member of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Circular Fashion Federation and the DICE+ Network, and is an active participant in the UN/CEFACT United Nations Transparency Protocol working group. An application to join CIRPASS has been submitted and was pending at the date of this statement.

A distinctive part of Symolem's impact is contributed time and expertise to the public frameworks on which product transparency will depend.

The United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP), developed under UN/CEFACT, is the emerging open standard for verifiable supply chain claims and Digital Product Passports. Symolem has made it the backbone of its standards work this year.

• We participated throughout the year as an active member of the UN/CEFACT UNTP Supply Chain Working Group, contributing practitioner perspective from retail and textiles to the protocol's development.
• We contributed to the UNTP v0.7.0 public review, submitting formal comments including a considered position on the protocol's vocabulary architecture and on keeping referenced vocabularies and standards openly accessible rather than behind paywalls. Open access to the standards that underpin product transparency is a position we will continue to advocate.
• We committed Symolem-ID to building natively on the protocol: the platform's credential architecture is UNTP-aligned by design, and the Fashion Intelligence Graph field register is mapped to it. This gives the working group something valuable in return, a live implementation feeding practical findings back into the standard as it matures.
• We applied UNTP thinking beyond retail's front end, contributing pro bono to the Digital Bale Passport concept for the second-hand textile trade, described in section 5, as an extension of the protocol's approach to a value chain that formal traceability has largely ignored.

• We made written policy submissions to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Business and Trade, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Office for Product Safety and Standards, and the House of Lords, addressing product regulation, digital traceability and textile accountability.
• We engaged with the implementation of the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 and the readiness of UK businesses for EU Digital Product Passport requirements.

We contribute to these processes as an independent voice. We do not accept payment for policy submissions or standards contributions, and our positions are our own.

Symolem's social impact work centres on accountability for the global second-hand textile trade and on economic opportunity in the communities most affected by it.

• The founder serves as Vice-Chair of the Landfills2Landmarks Foundation, a UN-accredited non-governmental organisation with operations in Accra, Ghana, focused on second-hand textile waste accountability and traceability.
• Through the Landfills2Landmarks Foundation, we contributed to and submitted a draft textiles Extended Producer Responsibility policy framework for Ghana, supporting the country's move toward formal accountability for the second-hand textile trade.
• In May 2026 we moderated sessions at the Landfills2Landmarks Summit in Accra, including a session on climate finance for textile recycling and energy-from-waste, convening voices from across the textile value chain.
• We contributed pro bono expertise to the development of the Digital Bale Passport concept and the Bale Index traceability approach, applying Digital Product Passport thinking to the second-hand textile trade.
• We began developing a social impact cooperative business structure for a tailoring hub project at Kakuma Refugee Camp, designed to give refugee tailors ownership of the enterprise their work creates. This work is in development and will be reported on further in next year's statement.

The Zayed Sustainability Prize is one of the world's leading sustainability awards. Established by the United Arab Emirates in honour of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Prize recognises organisations delivering measurable sustainability impact across categories including health, food, energy, water and climate action, drawing entrants from around the world.

For the Prize, we authored its Impact Framework: the assessment methodology used to evaluate entrants. The work involved defining impact in terms that can be evidenced, setting the criteria by which very different interventions can be compared fairly across categories, and building the discipline of separating claimed impact from demonstrated impact into the evaluation itself, so that the framework could withstand the scrutiny of an international jury and a global field of entrants.

Symolem Limited and Symolem-ID Ltd each fall below the turnover threshold at which section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires a slavery and human trafficking statement. We publish one voluntarily because our work concerns supply chain accountability and we believe the discipline should start with us.

Our own operations are professional services and software development carried out in the United Kingdom, and we assess the risk of modern slavery within them as low. Our supply chain consists mainly of professional services, software and cloud infrastructure providers. During the year we adopted a Supplier and Partner Code of Conduct setting out our expectations on labour standards, including the prohibition of child labour, forced labour and involuntary prison labour, and we expect the subcontractors and partners we engage to meet it.

Through our advisory work, our standards contributions and our support for the Landfills2Landmarks Foundation, we also work to strengthen the tools by which labour conditions in product supply chains can be evidenced and verified. We will report annually on this commitment.

We state our environmental position plainly and without inflation. The Symolem group is a services and software business with no manufacturing, no premises-intensive operations and a small team. Our material environmental impacts are business travel, cloud computing and hosting, and office energy use.

• Business travel this year included international travel to Ghana in connection with the Landfills2Landmarks Summit, alongside domestic travel in the United Kingdom.
• Our platform and websites are hosted on cloud infrastructure; we take energy efficiency into account in architecture and hosting decisions.
• We have not purchased carbon offsets this year and we make no carbon neutrality claim.

As the group grows we intend to establish a simple annual measurement of our footprint so that future statements can report figures and trends rather than description alone.

This year we established the foundations of the group's formal governance framework.

• We launched the Governance and Disclosures page, bringing the group's policies, statements and company information into one public place.
• We adopted the Symolem Group Code of Conduct and the Symolem-ID Data Ethics and Responsible AI Statement, and began work on the Supplier and Partner Code of Conduct.
• We established a confidential route for raising concerns, monitored by the Chief Executive, with committed acknowledgement and response timelines and an explicit protection against detriment for good faith reporting.
• Symolem Limited holds professional indemnity insurance, with insurer details and territorial coverage available on request.
• Artur Synowiec was confirmed as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Symolem-ID Ltd, strengthening the leadership of the platform entity.

The new financial year opens with the group's two biggest steps to date: Symolem-ID launches publicly on 1 September 2026 and opens its pre-seed investment round, and the advisory practice's ten new sustainability consultants begin work from 1 August 2026. Beyond these, in the year to August 2027 we intend to: publish the Supplier and Partner Code of Conduct and complete the governance document library; establish simple annual measurement of our environmental footprint; deepen our contribution to the United Nations Transparency Protocol as it matures; progress the Kakuma tailoring hub cooperative from design toward operation; and grow both entities while keeping the independence between them that this statement describes.

We welcome questions and scrutiny of anything in this statement. Correspondence may be directed to concerns@symolem.com.