How Traceability Can Help Fashion Brands Become More Sustainable

As consumers and government regulations call on companies to adopt increasingly sustainable practices, fashion brands need to rethink their approach to reducing their environmental impact. One of their key challenges is to achieve full visibility into all stages in the life cycle, from fiber-origin to retail. Without perfect traceability of the materials used, it's extremely difficult to verify and therefore establish the sustainability of the garments produced and marketed.

Fashion Brands in Search of Sustainability

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, if the fashion industry continues on its current path, by 2050 it could use more than 26 percent of the carbon budget associated with a 2C global warming limit. Moving away from the current linear and wasteful textiles system is therefore crucial to keep the 2C average global warming limit within reach. Given these figures, sustainable fashion has become a crucial issue in recent years, with a growing proportion of consumers becoming aware of the environmental and social impact of their purchasing decisions.

Traceability as an Entry Point to Sustainability

In recent years, the textile industry has been confronted with the obvious limitations of its traditional way of operating, characterized by significant overproduction and waste generation across the value chain, the increasing use of petroleum-based synthetic materials, and the globalization of production and supply chains for labor-cost arbitrage. Product traceability has become particularly difficult to establish, even as the rise of fast fashion has highlighted the negative environmental impact of certain practices and business models.

Yet traceability is now essential to guarantee responsible sourcing and production, generate trust between all players in the value chain, and meet the challenges of regulatory compliance for brands, while helping to build a much more positive image for the industry as a whole.

Implementing effective traceability throughout the textile value chain is a highly complex undertaking for brands, particularly given the large number of intermediaries involved in the garment manufacturing process. To overcome this difficulty, brands must have access to reliable information from the sourcing of textile fibers right through to the end of the garment's life cycle. What was a challenge yesterday is now made possible by the use of new technologies and the implementation of blockchain-inspired processes to improve the transparency and security of information used in the supply chain management systems of fashion manufacturers and brands.

These technological solutions not only make it possible to precisely track the origin of raw materials and the transformation and distribution stages of products, but also offer the possibility of sharing this information with consumers. By adopting such solutions, brands reinforce their credibility in terms of sustainability and social responsibility, responding to consumers' growing expectations in terms of transparency and ethics.

Technology as a New Vector for Data Authenticity, Reliability and Availability

Three fundamental principles are essential to achieving perfect traceability in the textile supply chain. Firstly, it's imperative to work with trusted data sources right from the start of the supply chain, collaborating with certified fiber producers. This ensures that traceability is based on reliable data from the outset. Here, third parties can combine physical evidence (e.g., laboratory-tested fiber samples) and digital evidence (e.g., invoices and shipping orders) to guarantee the authenticity of data linked to the fibers used and shipped.

Secondly, it's crucial to establish a closed-loop system where data is authenticated, verifiable and non-forgeable. This avoids duplication of inventory and maintains data consistency. By creating a digital twin of the raw material, it's much easier to track and control its use through the various stages of the value chain.

Finally, the third principle involves empowering all players in the supply chain to enter their own primary data, thus eliminating, at every stage, the risk of data errors or falsification when these do not emanate directly from the players concerned in the first place.

By adopting principles close to those used by blockchain, an information storage and transmission technology, a zero-sum game can be set up, guaranteed by peer-to-peer validation. Each kilo of material in the real world must correspond to one kilo of material in the digital world, and each player in the value chain attests to the conformity between the volume and nature of the material declared at the previous stage and the volume and nature of the material processed at its own level.

The adoption of this mode of operation is currently most suitable for sustainable, certified and differentiated materials as their origin is verifiable and distinct, such as organic fibers, man-made cellulosic, recycled materials, and responsible animal fibers.

Ultimately, it's in the fashion industry's best interest to generalize traceability from upstream to downstream by organizing all players to converge on a single platform, where each can confirm the data of its peers while participating in the sharing of a better quality of life.

Amit Gautam is the CEO and founder of TextileGenesis, a pioneering fiber-to-retail traceability platform for the fashion and textile supply chain.