Trace Elements: How Tech Firms Are Verifying the Origins of Garments and Their Impact

As interest in sustainability continues to rise, and supply chain issues persist in the wake of the pandemic, discussions around traceability have come to the surface—that is, how can brands ensure they understand the origins and journey behind the final garments that go to market?

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As 2030 draws nearer and sustainability regulations heat up for manufacturers and brands, particularly in the European Union, traceability is becoming a necessary part of doing business.

In recent years, several companies have come onto the scene to address brands’ interest in tracking data to enable traceability. Some of those firms extend their solutions to help brands bring the customer along by using technology to enable digital passports; others use scientific testing to help brands prove their claims around material origins. Overall, the goal of traceability technology remains verifying the origins of materials—and in some cases, transparency around environmental and social impact.

Fiber first

Oritain, a scientifically enabled cotton tracing company headquartered in New Zealand, aims to help companies understand the origins of the materials they use in their goods. The company does so by using forensic science technology to analyze cotton fibers for manufacturers and brands. According to Ben Tompkins, Oritain’s vice president of retail sales, the results of the testing are admissible in a court of law.

Tomkins explained the factors that make cotton easily traceable for the 15-year-old company.

“Everything that’s grown or made is a product of its environment. So, [for instance], I would take a strand of our hair and test it for trace elements and isotopes. You would be able to see where we’ve been based on the water that we’ve ingested and the atmosphere that we’ve been present to. And cotton, as a natural plant, is exactly the same. Cotton is absorbing elements from the soil. It’s being impacted by climatic and other atmospheric conditions. The plant is absorbing those naturally occurring elements which are unique to the location in which that cotton is grown,” Tomkins said.

Those isotopic factors enable the Oritain team to pinpoint the exact region of the world that cotton originated from, and it can do so whether it’s in raw form, in final garment form or any stage in between, just by receiving a sample from a partner company. That can help brands to ensure alignment with regulations and to substantiate claims around where their materials come from. That way, when a brand says it has made a garment with U.S. cotton, for instance, it can prove that.

Cone Denim, the Elevate Textiles-owned denim manufacturer, is Oritain’s marquis denim customer. It uses Oritain to certify for its customers that specific denim rolls were made of cotton from countries of interest and to assure them that the rolls are compliant with all regulations clients have to clear. Tomkins said that the testing technology is used by big box retailers who offer denim as part of their product matrices, but he could not disclose the names of those clients.

Despite heavy dyeing processes, denim is not any harder to analyze for origin than other fabrics, according to Tomkins. “From the early stages, we worked to develop our IP so that we can understand the chemical impact that processing had on the fiber itself,” he explained. “[That IP] can chemically or physically separate the synthetic components that we can test so that it doesn’t have any impact or bearing on the accuracy of the results, whether it’s denim or a T-shirt.”

Receiving results from the company takes between two and four business weeks. Once those results come in, Oritain communicates them to the client via a customer success manager. The cotton tester does not currently have a client interface in place.

Unlike other traceability solutions, Oritain technology does not enable end consumers to digitally obtain information about the garments they’ve purchased. However, Tomkins said partners receive trust-marked hang tags they can attach to Oritain-certified garments. Cone Denim uses those hang tags on their sample garments when speaking with customers.

Customer Service

Meanwhile, Sweden-based PaperTale and Aware, by Dutch company The Movement, have been using blockchain technology to allow both their clients and end consumers to understand the supply chain behind their garments.

Aware was one of the first signatories of The Denim Deal, a sustainability initiative started by the Dutch government which had goals around using recycled cotton in denim. It served as the traceability partner for the initiative.

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

Relative to The Denim Deal, Aware technology embeds tracer fibers into recycled cotton feedstock at the outset of production, which allows the material to be physically and digitally tracked through all stages of the production process. The tracer fibers are added in at a ratio of one to 1,000—so one kilogram of Aware’s tracer fibers is added in during spinning for every 1,000 kilograms of other fibers, said Warmerdam.

Once they’ve been added, the tracer fibers can be scanned at every touch point on the supply chain, which logs the activity of the fiber, fabric or garment, creating a digital twin. That data becomes available on public blockchain throughout the production of a garment. Warmerdam said the fibers are ingrained in the final garment permanently.

“You cannot take it out, it will always stay in the product. The fibers are not affecting the quality of the yarn,” he said.

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Scanning those fibers along the way allows data to be put in the hands of brands, manufacturers and, eventually, consumers. Part of Aware’s product is a consumer-facing digital passport, which can be accessed via a QR code on the garment. It shows consumers data about the garment and its social and environmental impacts, as calculated by a third party based on data participating manufacturers submit at the outset of a contract with Aware.

Feico van der Veen, Aware’s co-founder, said the metrics on the digital passport show less than what the partner receives—and that’s a purposeful choice.

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

Work Ware

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

The startup, which launched in 2018, uses individual product identification numbers to track the journey of garments, so each step of the process is both registered and verified. The technology enables brands and consumers to understand how much water a product used, as well as how much CO2 its production generated.

PaperTale’s biggest denim client is Pakistan’s Crescent Bahuman Limited, which implemented the technology in a Lahore, Pakistan factory. CBL did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Rivet.

Those details can help companies evaluate their compliance with future regulations—and force them to avoid greenwashing, since they’re reporting real data to their customers on the environmental impact of production.

“There is an issue called ‘techwashing,’ which means you put a QR code [on the garment], you put a nice story in, and you call it traceable. That’s short-term thinking. But using PaperTale technology, you can start working on the problems,” Bilal Bhatti, the company’s CEO and founder, said.

The technology also includes an extra subset of stakeholders in the process: garment workers. In factories that use PaperTale’s technology, garment workers are assigned a unique people identification number; as part of the end garment, consumers can better understand not only where their garment was made, but also who made it—and whether their labor conditions are ethical.

“Our ultimate goal is that products are made slavery free,” Bhatti said.

The technology feature comes at a time when forced labor has been a hot topic for brands, with major denim companies like Levi’s under fire for potential involvement in China’s Xinjiang region.

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

The interfaces allow communication between the three subgroups. Consumers can send smiley faces to garment workers as a thank you for the work they did on the garment; garment workers can verify that the factory they are employed by paid them the right amount on the right date and PaperTale partners and factories can see which products a consumer has purchased and scanned to try creating repeat purchasers, Bhatti said.

This article was published in Rivet magazine. Click here to read more.

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