Material-embedded identity gives materials "memory," enabling waste to become a verifiable, reusable, and valuable commodity

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / December 30, 2025 / SMX PLC (NASDAQ:SMX; SMXWW), a global provider of material-embedded identity and digital traceability solutions, has positioned its physical-to-digital platform as a way for fashion brands to confront the structural challenges highlighted in The State of Fashion 2025 report, including excess inventory, overproduction, supply-chain inefficiency, and the growing requirement to increase and verify recycled content in products.

Those challenges are often framed as operational failures or forecasting mistakes. In reality, they point to something more fundamental. Fashion and luxury have a memory problem.

The materials that define premium products carry critical information long before they reach a runway or retail floor. Where they originated. How they were processed. What was blended, substituted, or recycled along the way. Yet once those materials enter global supply chains, that information begins to fade. Not because brands are careless, but because the systems meant to preserve identity were never designed for today's scale and complexity.

When materials forget who they are, everything built on top of them becomes harder to manage.

When Memory Breaks, Inventory Follows

The most visible symptom of this failure is inventory imbalance.

Fashion brands are holding excess stock while simultaneously missing demand in the products and sizes consumers actually want. Warehouses fill, margins compress under discounting, and perfectly usable inventory becomes a liability rather than an asset.

This is not only a planning problem. It is a visibility problem. When materials and products lose their identity as they move through supply chains, brands lose precision. They may know how much inventory they hold, but not always what it truly is, where it belongs, or how it can be used in a compliant and profitable way.

Without persistent identity, inventory stops behaving like something that can be managed intelligently. It becomes noise that must be cleared before it creates more risk.

Why Documentation Can't Keep Up

Traditional inventory and compliance systems rely on documentation that fragments over time. Labels detach. Records live in disconnected databases. Attributes that matter most, recycled content, sourcing, and regulatory eligibility, are separated from the product itself.

For luxury and premium fashion, this creates a dangerous imbalance. Products are designed to endure, but the proof of what they are often expires far sooner than the product. As time passes, uncertainty grows, even around authentic goods.

That uncertainty forces brands into reactive behavior. Broad discounting replaces precision. Overstock is cleared quickly to reduce exposure, often at the expense of brand equity, sustainability commitments, and long-term value.

Restoring Identity at the Material Level

Addressing excess inventory and recycled-content requirements requires more than better forecasting. It requires preserving identity from the start.

By embedding identity directly into raw materials, precisely what SMX does, continuity is maintained through production, distribution, resale, and recycling. Information no longer needs to be reconstructed or revalidated. It remains attached to the material itself.

When products retain material-level identity, inventory behaves differently. Brands can identify what they have, what meets regulatory thresholds, and what can move confidently into resale, redistribution, or recycling channels. Compliance becomes verifiable rather than assumptive.

Within a fashion and luxury market defined by overproduction, margin pressure, and tightening regulation, the ability to remember what was made is no longer optional. Memory is becoming a prerequisite for control.

About SMX

As global businesses face new and complex challenges relating to carbon neutrality and meeting new governmental and regional regulations and standards, SMX is able to offer players along the value chain access to its marking, tracking, measuring and digital platform technology to transition more successfully to a low-carbon economy.

Forward-Looking Statements

This information contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts, and assumptions regarding future events involving SMX (NASDAQ: SMX), its technologies, its partnership activities, and its development of molecular marking systems for recycled PET and other materials. Forward-looking statements are not historical facts. They involve risks, uncertainties, and factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied.

Forward looking statements in this editorial include, but are not limited to, its announced capital facility and its terms, expectations regarding the integration of SMX's molecular markers into U.S. recycling markets; the potential for FDA-compliant markers to enable recycled PET to enter food-grade and other regulated applications; the scalability of SMX solutions across diverse global supply chains; anticipated adoption of identity-based verification systems by manufacturers, recyclers, regulators, or brand owners; the potential economic impact of turning recycled plastics into tradeable or monetizable assets; the expected performance of SMX's Plastic Cycle Token or other digital verification instruments; and the belief that molecular-level authentication may influence pricing, compliance, sustainability reporting, or financial strategies used within the plastics sector.

These forward-looking statements are also subject to assumptions regarding regulatory developments, market demand for authenticated recycled content, the pace of corporate adoption of traceability technology, global economic conditions, supply chain constraints, evolving environmental policies, and general industry behavior relating to sustainability commitments and recycling mandates. Risks include, but are not limited to, changes in FDA or international regulatory standards; technological challenges in large-scale deployment of molecular markers; competitive innovations from other companies; operational disruptions in recycling or plastics manufacturing; fluctuations in pricing for virgin or recycled plastics; and the broader economic conditions that influence capital investment and industrial activity.

Detailed risk factors are described in SMX's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements. These statements speak only as of the date of publication. SMX undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward looking statements to reflect subsequent events, changes in circumstances, or new information, except as required by applicable law.

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SOURCE: SMX (Security Matters) Public Limited