The need to back sustainable and ethical claims is driving the adoption of traceability systems in the denim industry. As paper and pdf-based certificates no longer offer the necessary security, digital technologies promise to provide not only an extra layer of safety but also new services in support of sustainability and transparency.

Do you know where your cotton comes from? This is a deceptively simple question. As soon as the raw material is captured by the textile industry, it is blended with fibres from multiple bales and from various farms in a process that deliberately mixes fibres to obtain homogenous yarns. Once spun into a yarn, woven into a fabric and sewed into a garment, it is anyone’s guess where the original raw material was grown. The simple question doesn’t call for a specific answer, unless a mill or brand has chosen to use a specific type of cotton, Pima or organic, recycled or even carbon positive. Then provenance needs to be proven and certificates secured.

There are roughly two ways to go about this, placing a physical tracer on the fibre is one option, but some systems say they can trace a material using digital tools and data, without marking the raw material itself. Whatever the case, any traceability programme poses constraints on operators and requires an elaborate infrastructure for testing, tracing and monitoring. Without a tracer, online platforms need to map out the supply chain, which is a long and time-consuming process. Convincing, and training, farmers and workers to input data is another challenge.

The value of being able to certify provenance is nonetheless ever more compelling, driven in no small part by legislation requiring companies to guarantee the absence of human rights abuses in their supply chains as is now the case in the UK, US and Germany. The recent tampering of QR codes affecting GOTS-certified organic cotton in India also shed light on the vulnerable nature of conventional paper or pdf-based tracking methods.

The need to back sustainability claims with scientific proof is one of the main reasons mills and brands are looking to trace their goods. Natural materials, such as cotton, pose specific challenges in that they do not come from a clearly identified factory. The farm to gin to spinner stages are considered weak links in the system, pretty problematic as this is where the variety of cotton or agriculture practice provide much of the added value and sustainable attributes of a fibre.

It all starts at the farm, and this is how Australian growers Danielle and David Statham came to develop FibreTrace to keep track of their carbon positive cotton throughout its transformation in the textile and apparel supply chain. After investigating various technologies, they chose a solution based on a luminescent pigment, the same that secures currency and passports. Initial trials were conducted on Good Earth Cotton fibres used by Australian jeanswear brand Nobody Denim last year.

Cotton USA adopted Applied DNA Sciences’ SigNature T tracer in 2016 to guarantee its American-grown cotton. The US Cotton Trust Protocol, a science-based sustainability programme launched in 2020, has partnered with a digital blockchain-backed platform developed by Textile Genesis.

Vertically integrated companies are also finding it necessary to better monitor and trace organic or recycled content. To align its material processing with its circular and sustainable goals, Pakistan-based Artistic Fabric Mills (AFM) is using a tracer-based technology developed by Aware, a Dutch start-up. Artistic Milliners, also based in Karachi, has chosen a digital solution created by retraced, a German start-up. It is being introduced into a cotton improvement scheme with 500 cotton farmers in the Rahim Yar Khan region of Pakistan. “This programme is designed to improve the quality of Pakistani cotton by supporting and training farmers and it provides them with an accounting system that gives them a better view of their finances and a better understanding of the resources they use to grow their cotton,” retraced co-founder, COO and CMO Philipp Mayer tells Inside Denim. He believes it is essential “to engage farmers in the process” as “they will get paid extra if they deliver higher quality cotton”. 

Physical vs digital 

From DNA tracers to phone apps, a wide array of technologies is thus being deployed in the denim industry. Promoters of DNA-based systems believe they provide robust forensic evidence that holds up in court. Applied DNA Sciences, based in Stony Brook, US, has long experience with its technology as it is used on paper currency. “Our technology is solid, DNA is recognised as a forensic marker that is admissible in court,” says MeiLin Wan, the company’s vice-president of textile sales. DNA is a good match for cotton, she says, due in part to its chemical structure (hydrogen and oxygen) and to the double stranded molecules that provide dual binding. Furthermore, “identifying the presence of DNA has benefited from exponential progress in Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests,” she says.

Swiss company Haelixa also bases its concept on DNA-based tracers it initially developed for precious gems before expanding into textiles in 2018. The marker is sprayed or applied during any wet process and is one of the few GOTS-approved tracers for use on organic textiles. “Our application method is mostly-water based, it doesn’t have any harmful chemicals. It is also used in minute quantities. We can identify a tracer even if it is under 1 ppm,” Dr Michela Puddu, company co-founder, tells Inside Denim. “We can generate as many DNA sequences as needed, and they cannot be altered.” Diamond Denim, part of Pakistan-based Sapphire Group, is using Haelixa’s system for its recycled cotton.

Aware, a traceability system launched by Dutch start-up The Movement, has chosen nanoparticle-based tracers backed by a blockchain technology which was initially developed for plastics by Circularise, a spin-off from the Delft University of Technology. Recent adopters of this technology include Denim Deal, a consortium of companies promoting the use of recycled cotton, and Turkish denim mill Çalik.

A physical marker is not a stand-alone system. Its application is always recorded in a database, and more often than not backed by a digital twin or token, stored in the cloud, and copied and secured in a blockchain. This online platform follows a material’s progress in the supply chain, validating each operation, as new data is input, and the tokens move on to the next stage.

The application of a physical tracer implies a small additional cost that the promoters of these systems strive to keep as low as possible. “Transparency shouldn’t have to cost the earth,” says FibreTrace CEO Shannon Mercer. He says FibreTrace adds less than 2 cents on a T-shirt, and will lead to higher sell through rates. Aware supplies the tracer and sells tokens corresponding to the tagged merchandise. The Movement invoices a percentage to the spinner and to the final customer, brand or retailer, based on quantities purchased and number of tokens. “We have designed this system to keep the price of yarn as low as possible,” says Aware brand director Koen Warmerdam. He estimates that it can add 2-3% to the cost of a finished product.

Other solutions in development do not rely on a physical tracer but use sophisticated algorithms and statistics to monitor a material throughout its processing. Oritain, a company founded in New Zealand with offices around the world, uses forensic science to verify the origin of products based on the environment in which the cotton (or other natural material) is grown. It says that “everything that is grown or reared absorbs a unique ratio of elements and nutrients from its environment” which constitutes its ‘Origin Fingerprint’. Oritain takes samples on farm sites to establish the Origin Fingerprint and stores the information in its database. Using forensic science and statistics, it can analyse a sample of a product and verify the origin against the reference fingerprint stored in its database. Although processing and treatments can affect concentrations of some naturally occurring elements in a product, Oritain says it can verify origin at any point in the supply chain. In the last year, the company says it has continually audited and validated Cone Denim’s supply chain to verify the responsible origin of its cotton.

Algorithms & statistics

The systems that do not rely on a physical tracer need to model a company’s supply chain, its materials, processes, styles, customers, and possibly more, so that any anomaly or suspicious transaction can be spotted. This implies a strong digital infrastructure and considerable data to feed the statistics and algorithms that will monitor materials. The advantage they promote is that the data can include a great amount of information, including a material’s impacts. They can thus provide not only traceability but also sustainability metrics that can be shared across all partners within a supply chain. This is what retraced, the company founded in 2019, offers with its online platform. It is a system that provides verified, certified information to brands and consumers in an easy to use and graphic format. “Our goal is not only to promote transparency, but also better practices from the farm onwards,” says Mr Mayer, in reference to the programme with Artistic Milliners mentioned earlier.

Retraced believes brands also stand to gain by implementing the system, based on a case study with sustainable LA denim brand Boyish. When a retraced widget was placed on its e-shop, and customers interacted with it, it led to a 13% increase in online conversions.

The fully digital traceability solution developed by Textile Genesis can be paired with a physical tracer, but can also work without one. The start-up based in Hong Kong and Bangalore, India, compensates for the absence of a marker with in-depth data of all manufacturing processes. For each kilogram of fibre from a verified point of origin, the platform generates a digital token, or Fibrecoin, which, at each stage of manufacturing, will be matched to an algorithm for authentication. A spinner will input the count and composition of a yarn, and the Textile Genesis platform can monitor blends. “A 100 kg of Tencel can be used to make a 50% Tencel/50% cotton yarn, now representing a volume of 200 kg of yarn. If a spinner tries to register 201 kg, our system will block the transaction,” says Textile Genesis CEO and founder Amit Gautam. His example is a theoretical one, as the company’s model integrates average wastage for each manufacturing stage. “We have modelled the entire supply chain in detail, down to grammage in weaving. It is not mass balance, but actual flow of goods at article level as it happens in real-life scenario,” he says. “The level of granularity provides high robustness. The algorithm will block any transaction that is deemed not physically possible.” Unsurprisingly, the modelling of industrial processes was a time-consuming one.

Swedish start-up TrusTrace has also spent a lot of time mapping out processes and inputs, including data specific to each customer, such as materials, styles and purchase orders. Its system is designed to work not only with a company’s existing product management software but also with sustainability platforms such as the Higg Co’s modules and certifications managed by Textile Exchange. The company has also taken care to make its solution easy to use.

“The pandemic has accelerated interest,” says TrusTrace co-founder and CSO Hrishikesh Rajan. “Large and small brands saw it as an opportunity to reset their sustainability goals.” Suppliers have also shown interest, as they may risk losing business if they cannot provide robust guarantees. “The data we provide can be used by companies in their sustainability and ESG reports,” he adds.

Though these digital platforms do not need a physical tracer, they can integrate any type of marker in their systems. Unifi embeds a proprietary tracer in its Repreve-branded recycled polyester, as does Lenzing in its premium Tencel and Ecovero fibres.

Now that these systems have become operational, for the most part, the next step for them is to attract widespread adoption. But farmers, ginners, mills and manufacturers now face multiple choices. Understandably, they would like to see a single unified or interoperable method emerge that will cover the demands of a wide swathe of customers. Others point out that these programmes require suppliers to share sensitive information, and to be truly fair, data sharing should go both ways. What type of information should be conveyed to consumers is another question that industry insiders raise.

The developers of these solutions also need to contend with the specifications and details of diverse standards, certifications, and even multiple certificate formats. “Everyone is feeling the pressure to be more transparent, even standards are being pressured to modernise and harmonise their systems,” points out Mr Gautam at Textile Genesis. But he sees the entire industry progressively working its way to digitalisation. For Mr Rajan, “we will see consortium blockchains emerge in the future, and brands working together more.” Admittedly, the sustainability issues the industry faces go far beyond the scope of a single company. The denim industry is not only increasingly inextricably connected, it is also increasingly collectively accountable.

The LEDs on FibreTrace’s spectrometer display the proportion of tested material that has a marker. “If a bad player adds 50% conventional cotton to a fabric labelled 100% organic cotton, the signal will indicate it, without having to send a sample to a lab,” says Shannon Mercer, FibreTrace CEO.  
Photo:  FibreTrace

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