At the KingPins denim trade show last week, industry experts gathered to discuss how to solve one of the textile and fashion industry’s biggest problems: Traceability. More specifically, traceability in the age of technology was the point of focus.

But what is traceability, and why trace things? Why is tracing cotton such an essential step for the denim industry, and what makes it so difficult? And more topically, why is the sector pinning so much hope on traceability solving big, unwieldy problems like ecological damage and water scarcity?

Traceability in context

Cotton is a commodity fibre harvested at farms, then sent to processing sites (gins) and onto markets that sell it in multiples of tonnes. From there, it is ordinarily shipped to spinners and mills to produce the yarns and textiles that brands and manufacturers source to make their products. The upshot? Multiple stages of cotton lint mixing have occurred before it becomes a yarn or fabric.

If only one cotton type was grown using a single set of methods with universal standards, understanding cotton’s environmental and social costs would be relatively straightforward. Consequently, it would be calculable, lacking curiosity in origin and processing. But as it stands, commodity cotton is not sold specific to source or type – it is mixed and sorted according to many other factors. Supply chain stakeholders have historically benefitted from this lack of traceability over where cotton comes from and how it was grown.

Brand involvement

Today, end users of cotton are under pressure to understand the impact of cotton on the planet and people. But that’s not possible if it’s of unknown origin – ‘untraced’. Regulations making brands responsible for their supply chain and science-based targets urging them to reduce these impacts are bearing down heavily – particularly in Europe¹. Climate change is costly and exacerbated by the conventional farming practices that generate most of the cotton consumed.

So, there are multiple problems that traceability could help disentangle. Two main ones for cotton are the farm of origin and proof of the agricultural method used (see our recent Two Truths article on organic versus regenerative cotton to understand this further).

Conventional vs organic vs regenerative

Understanding whether cotton was grown using conventional, organic or other methods is very difficult in today’s market. This obfuscation is deliberate, according to Advance Denim’s Global Innovation Manager Mark Ix during the discussion at KingPins. When attempting to buy cotton of verified origin, Ix says he has been rebuffed by national cotton grower organisations who see no benefit in making such a distinction between fibre sources. What difference would traceability make, according to Ix? It would provide the framework for data collection to allow information to flow more freely and be gathered more empirically, despite the agenda of individual stakeholders.

Brand challenges

But aren’t there certifications for organic cotton, for example, that mitigate this problem? According to Nicolas Prophte, VP of Denim Innovation at PVH, he is no longer inclined to look at, or discuss, certifications, and for good reason². Instead, he is focused on primary data collection, mapped across PVH’s cotton supply chain, beginning with the cotton farmers. He places no comfort in globally averaged data from LCAs. He feels that traceability (tracking physical fibres and the accompanying data along the entire supply chain) is the first step in accurate cotton impact assessment.

In PVH’s case, what is traced is the cotton fibre because it contains a photopigment with a ‘digital signature’ embedded invisibly into it. These nanoparticle pigments are usually mixed into the cotton at the farm, gin or mill. This indestructible additive is detected by a hand-held scanner, anchoring it digitally via the blockchain to the farm of origin and all other data points of entry along the supply chain. When combined, the photopigment, hardware and software solution negates fallible chain-of-custody certifications, says the tech provider’s CEO, Shannon Mercer.

Technology from farm to final product

Mercer heads up the tech company FibreTrace, the organiser of the discussion at KingPins. He added during the conversation that certifications are irrelevant in a world where fibres can be traced by physical and digital means and where data calculating their impacts is readily available. Embedded traceability could offer impact assessment from cradle-to-grave, spanning farm, fibre, textile and product impacts – enabled by the permanent particle signature within the product, connected to the blockchain.

But in a price-sensitive industry, such technology comes at a cost. Whilst PVH and Advance Denim pay a premium for this inbuilt traceability and the environmental data it provides, many brands and mills focus on margins first. Only some brands are positioned to adopt a physical hardware and software solution and gather primary data from every stakeholder in their cotton supply chain – most of whom they are unlikely to know (for the commodity and market reasons mentioned earlier). Photopigments might be better described as imaginative figments for most brands still struggling to map their Tier 1 suppliers.

Inevitable Impact tax?

The discussion then turned to mapping the supply chain independent of physical fibre markers. Several solutions exist, including TrusTrace, which leverages AI to deliver product-level sustainability data³ for fashion and retail. Also in the tech mix is the newly launched FibreTrace MAPPED platform that offers fibre-to-retail traceability via a centralised digital chain of custody connected to the blockchain⁴. FibreTrace MAPPED is a free software solution for brands to visually map their global supply chains, including supplier name, type and location.

This exercise can be a mammoth task at the fibre and product level. Within day-to-day operations, such traceability efforts only find a purpose when they offer tangible business benefits or risk mitigation. Shannon Mercer believes FibreTrace MAPPED is the way forward for brands not yet able to trace to Tiers 4 and 5 but are aware of upcoming regulations (which Mercer believes will include a “tax” on material and product impacts). Aside from the context provided by Mercer, TrusTrace CTO Madhava Venkatesh Raghavan has also been vocal about the European Commission working to implement its Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) program. When it becomes law, the PEF will require companies to calculate and disclose the environmental impact of their products by tracing their origins through supply chains⁵.

Macro Technology

Professor Jacquie McGlade, the former Chief Scientist of the UN Environmental Programme and Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, joined the discussion remotely from Kenya. Jacquie is implementing satellite technology for measuring and understanding the environment – including measuring soil health – at the startup she co-founded, Downforce⁶. Jacquie was instrumental in assessing global plastic pollution, ultimately leading to regulation and legislation banning single-use plastics in Europe and beyond.

According to McGlade, using technology to trace and calculate impacts of plastic waste and pollution serves as a blueprint for other fibres, including cotton. She explained that satellite technology offers near real-time data on the environmental status of land without the need for manual data collection or specialist equipment. The scaling of this technology will allow farmers to adapt practices quickly and decisively and shape how they grow food and fibres, she added. As a result, growers stand to gain environmentally and financially, as evidenced by what she has seen at farms local to her in Kenya.

In this sense, a tremendous amount of data can be connected to geo-locations and, therefore, farms, cutting through the opacity of today’s supply chains and delivering calibrated primary data connected to software such as FibreTrace MAPPED. Such a connected system could also alleviate data fatigue, where mills and manufacturers inherit the job of tracing fibres on behalf of brands, entering data into multiple spreadsheets or software solutions specific to each brand. “A mill I spoke with recently said they have five staff members dedicated to entering this data,” said Mercer.

Traceability now and beyond

What remains is that robust traceability, right now, depends on knowing all the actors along the supply chain for each fibre, material and product and making agreements with them to gather data that can be analysed and input with high confidence to inform decision-making.

All the experts quoted spoke of the need for consistency: for a universal traceability standard with consistent and comparable metrics and units. Unfortunately, this is far from the case now, as highlighted by Mercer and Prophte. They described the lack of a universal standard as a source of confusion and inertia hampering the commencement of traceability efforts by many.

At one end of the traceability spectrum, many brands are commencing Tier 1 mapping. At the other, few are collecting primary data in the supply chain to Tiers 4 and 5 to calculate their fibre and material impacts before making products. The gap is wide, but the stated technologies look well-placed to help fill it.

Images courtesy of KingPins and TeamPeterStigter