With increasing interest in sustainability and ongoing supply chain issues in the wake of the pandemic, discussions around traceability have come to the surface. How can brands ensure they can trace the origins and journey of the garments that ultimately make it to market?

As 2030 approaches and sustainability regulations for manufacturers and brands become more stringent – ​​especially in the European Union – traceability is becoming a necessary part of doing business.

In recent years, several companies have emerged that are tapping into brands’ interest in tracking data for traceability. Some of these firms are expanding their solutions to help brands bring their customers along by using technology to create digital passports; others are using scientific testing to help brands prove their material origin claims. Overall, the goal of traceability technology remains verification of material origin – and in some cases transparency about environmental and social impacts.

Fiber first

Oritain, a science-based cotton traceability company based in New Zealand, wants to help companies determine the origin of the materials they use in their products. The company uses forensic science technology to analyze cotton fibers for manufacturers and brands. The test results are admissible in court, according to Ben Tompkins, Oritain’s vice president of retail sales.

Tomkins explained the factors that enable cotton traceability for the 15-year-old company.

“Everything that is grown or manufactured is a product of its environment. For example, I would take a strand of our hair and test it for trace elements and isotopes. Based on the water we’ve consumed and the atmosphere we’ve been exposed to, you could tell where we’ve been. And with cotton as a natural plant, it’s exactly the same. Cotton absorbs elements from the soil. It’s affected by climatic and other atmospheric conditions. The plant absorbs these naturally occurring elements that are unique to the place where the cotton is grown,” Tomkins said.

These isotope factors allow the Oritain team to determine the exact region of the world where the cotton is sourced. They can do this whether the cotton is in raw form, in finished garment form, or at any stage in between, simply by obtaining a sample from a partner company. This can help brands ensure compliance with regulations and support claims about the origin of their materials. For example, if a brand claims to have made a garment from US cotton, they can prove it this way.

Cone Denim, Elevate Textiles’ denim manufacturer, is Oritain’s Marquis denim customer. It uses Oritain to certify to its customers that certain denim rolls are made from cotton from the appropriate countries and to assure them that the rolls meet any regulations the customers must meet. Tomkins said the testing technology is used by major retailers that offer denim as part of their product matrices, but he could not reveal the names of those customers.

Despite complex dyeing processes, Tomkins said denim’s provenance analysis is no more difficult than other fabrics. “From the beginning, we’ve worked to develop our intellectual property to understand the chemical impact of processing on the fiber itself,” he explained. “(This intellectual property) can chemically or physically separate the synthetic components that we can test, so it doesn’t affect the accuracy of the results, whether it’s denim or a T-shirt.”

It takes between two and four business weeks for the results to arrive from the company. Once these results are available, Oritain communicates them to the customer through a customer success manager. The Cotton Tester does not currently have a customer interface.

Unlike other traceability solutions, Oritain’s technology does not allow end consumers to digitally obtain information about the garments they have purchased. However, Tomkins says partners receive confidence-labeled hang tags to attach to Oritain-certified garments. Cone Denim uses these hang tags on its sample garments when speaking to customers.

Customer Service

Meanwhile, Sweden-based PaperTale and Dutch company The Movement’s Aware are using blockchain technology to provide both their customers and end consumers with insights into the supply chain of their garments.

Aware was one of the first signatories of The Denim Deal, a sustainability initiative by the Dutch government that aims to use recycled cotton in denim. The company acted as a traceability partner for the initiative.

Koen Warmerdam, co-founder of Aware, said the team has worked with several denim brands, including Armedangels, Jack & Jones and Kings of Indigo.

Compared to The Denim Deal, Aware’s technology embeds tracer fibers into recycled cotton raw materials at the start of production, allowing the material to be physically and digitally tracked through all stages of the production process. The tracer fibers are added at a ratio of 1:1,000 – so for every 1,000 kilograms of other fibers, one kilogram of Aware’s tracer fibers is added during spinning, Warmerdam said.

Once added, the tracer fibers can be scanned at any supply chain touchpoint, logging the activity of the fiber, fabric or garment and creating a digital twin. This data becomes available on the public blockchain throughout the production of a garment. Warmerdam says the fibers are permanently incorporated into the finished garment.

“You can’t take it out, it always stays in the product. The fibers do not affect the quality of the yarn,” he said.

By scanning these fibers during the manufacturing process, data can be obtained from brands, manufacturers and ultimately consumers. Part of Aware’s product is a digital passport for consumers, accessible via a QR code on the garment. It shows consumer data about the garment and its social and environmental impacts, calculated by a third party based on data submitted by participating manufacturers at the start of a contract with Aware.

Feico van der Veen, co-founder of Aware, says the metrics on the digital passport show less than what the partner receives – and that is a conscious decision.

“We thought at the beginning that the consumer would like to see everything. But after that we did a lot of test panels… and in the end the consumer didn’t want to see so much. They wanted to know, okay, is this sustainable? Yes or no?” said van der Veen.

Workwear

PaperTale also uses open-source blockchain and digital twins to track the journey of garments.

Founded in 2018, the startup uses individual product identification numbers to track the journey of garments, so that every step of the process is both registered and verified. The technology allows brands and consumers to understand how much water a product has used and how much CO2 was released during its production.

PaperTale’s largest denim customer is Pakistan-based Crescent Bahuman Limited, which has implemented the technology at a factory in Lahore, Pakistan. CBL did not respond to several requests for comment from Rivet.

These details can help companies assess their compliance with future regulations – and they force them to avoid “greenwashing” by sharing real data with their customers about the environmental impact of their production.

“There is a problem called ‘techwashing’. That means you put a QR code (on the garment), tell a nice story and call it trackable. That’s short-term thinking. But with PaperTale technology, you can start working on the problems,” said Bilal Bhatti, CEO and founder of the company.

The technology also brings another group of stakeholders into the process: the garment workers. In factories that use PaperTale’s technology, garment workers are assigned a unique personal identification number. As part of the finished garment, consumers can better understand not only where their garment was made, but also who made it – and whether the working conditions are ethical.

“Our primary goal is to produce slavery-free products,” Bhatti said.

The technology article comes at a time when forced labor is a hot topic for brands and major jeans manufacturers like Levi’s are under fire for their possible involvement in China’s Xinjiang region.

PaperTale has three separate interfaces: one for partners and factories, one for consumers, and one for the supply chain, which includes garment workers.

The interfaces allow communication between the three subgroups. Consumers can send smileys to garment workers as a thank you for working on the garment; garment workers can check that the factory they are employed by paid them the right amount on the right day; and PaperTale’s partners and factories can see what products a consumer has purchased and scanned them to try to attract repeat buyers, Bhatti said.

This article was published in Rivet magazine. Click here to continue reading.