The software programs developed by machinery makers and chemicals suppliers have given the denim industry a head start in environmental scoring systems. These digital tools provide data to plug into future digital product passports. But how many gaps remain, and can information be transferred from one platform to another?

Compliance may not be the key word of the year, but it could be the word of the decade. The notion of responsibility came to prominence when the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka in 2013. This is when it became all too clear that brands and retailers have a responsibility for working conditions in their supply chain. It propelled the notion of compliance to the forefront, and made monitoring social and environmental impacts a given, at least for the most forward-thinking companies.

Looming legislation is now powering the trend. The European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) came into force on July 18 this year. Among its myriad facets, it stipulates that products sold in the bloc will have a “single, digital entry point to access information about the environmental sustainability of products”, aka a Digital Product Passport (DPP). This tracing and grading mechanism has several goals, one is to help consumers and businesses make informed choices when purchasing products by providing data on a product’s impacts, another is to help enforcement authorities perform checks and controls.

While the perimeter of the European ecodesign regulation has been fairly clearly defined, its implementation is still a work in progress. By 2030, all products sold in the EU will require a digital product passport detailing information on materials and chemicals, environmental impacts, repairability and recycling potential. But the final IT and data specifications will not be known until the end of 2025.

The EU’s Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR), also a part of its Green Deal, has chosen a set of 16 life cycle assessment-based indicators, which gives an idea of the possible scope of the future DPP. It is expected to become mandatory from 2027 onwards, applying to progressively smaller-sized companies.

A DDP for each individual product

A report by ABI Research, a technology intelligence firm, estimates that by 2030, some 62.5 billion DPPs will have been created in the apparel sector. This, it projects, will generate $1.59 billion in revenues for supporting software and IT suppliers. Digital IDs for individual products are already common in the luxury sector. Ralph Lauren says it is activating 88 million digital product IDs in the course of 2024. The US corporation first introduced digital IDs for authentication purposes in 2019, and has since expanded their role to accompany its circular economy data strategy, with data related to transparency and traceability.

Laundries lead

Jeanologia introduced its Environmental Impact Measurement (EIM) software in 2009. It was initially designed as an internal monitoring system for its own product development teams, before being made available to its customers. “Brands began adopting it in 2014,” Begoña Garcia, Jeanologia’s head of R&D and sustainable processing, tells Inside Denim. The software platform, available on subscription, is now used by 400 laundries and 80 brands globally and delivers a rating for a product’s impacts at finishing.

The company based in Valencia, Spain, has continually updated its software platform. New features have been added over the years, such as a dashboard in 2022, and a more scientific set of benchmarks for specific product categories in 2023, covering four key impact areas: water and energy consumption, chemicals and worker impact. It has become a near standard in the denim sector, as it compares industry averages with individual scores, and a full-fledged product development tool, as its scoring system is easy to use and understand. “Brands can analyse different production centres. They can compare two options to see what impact they have on a product’s score and decide if it makes sense to change a process,” says Ms Garcia who created the program. These benchmarks, she adds, are continually updated to align with industry practices and to encourage permanent progress.

Tonello, a maker of laundry equipment based in Italy, has devised its own digital monitoring platform called Metro Consumption. “It measures a laundry’s actual consumption, including that of machines, garments and processes. It makes it possible to set specific sustainability goals and understand when, where and how to take action to increase efficiency. It also generates an environmental passport that reports the actual data of water and energy consumed for each individual garment and the calculation of the carbon footprint related to the finishing process,” says Alberto Lucchin, Tonello’s marketing and sustainability manager.

While Jeanologia’s scoring system is based on a three-level colour-coded scale (low, medium and high impact), Tonello has adopted A-to-F ratings. In both cases, the data provided by the platform can be used both internally, for customers, and externally to provide consumers with information on a product’s make and impacts. “While much of the data is used internally and in B2B settings to optimise processes, it is increasingly being leveraged to communicate sustainability to consumers,” says Mr Lucchin.

The data these software platforms provide is presumed to be accurate and reliable, as they come directly from the makers of the machines in laundries around the world. But they only cover the finishing stages of denim manufacturing and, though it may be difficult to alter or doctor them, they are technically self-reported. Jeanologia recently teamed up with GoBlu, a chemicals management company, to add an extra layer of reliability to its EIM scoring system. “It was important for us to involve an independent player in the process of developing our new verification program,” says Ms Garcia, noting that GoBlu’s capacity in IT solutions and data intelligence adds to Jeanologia’s competences.

Chemicals suppliers have also been early providers of impact calculators. These global players face constant chemicals-bashing, and they have the resources to develop digital monitoring systems. Swiss specialty chemicals supplier Archroma offers such a platform, the One Way Impact Calculator, which, combined with a Sustainability Improvement Program, helps customers optimise processes, reduce impacts and ensure compliance with restricted substances lists.

Distressed by widely circulated figures on excessive water usage in indigo dyeing, Peter Zinser, CEO and co-founder of reduced indigo specialist BluConnection set up a rating system years ago. It is designed to help the industry counter the dominant narrative for one of its major suspected hotspots. He believes that excessive water usage is not due to indigo dyeing but rather to wet processes used to fade garments. BluConnection’s online platform provides customers with customised tracking and impact information, accessed via a QR code.

Filling in the gaps

However smart and easy to use they are, sustainability monitoring systems developed by chemicals companies or machinery manufacturers only provide data for their part of the garment making and selling process. But the is no need to worry, dozens of start-ups have been founded to fill in the gaps. They promise to cover supply chains from farm to store shelf and to provide assistance in compliance and sustainability goals. The Higg Index is an early provider of such data. The platform, now hosted by Worldly, has recently upgraded its product impact calculator to cover a company’s scope 3 emissions. Countless others, in the likes of Green Score, Peftrust, Trustrace, Textile Genesis, to name a few, offer all-encompassing PEF and life cycle assessment (LCA) services to monitor progress and share data, in various forms, internally and externally.

Denim Authority, a denim manufacturer based in Tunisia, has chosen to work with Dutch traceability solutions company Aware. Its system is based on a physical tracer, which is embedded in recycled fibres and secured by a blockchain. Like many traceability experts, including Ms Begoña at Jeanologia, the company believes that a ‘fibre backwards’ approach is excessively complicated and prone to error. Aware believes that a solid traceability program starts with raw materials and then proceeds to all subsequent processes.

AGI Denim, a vertical denim manufacturer based in Pakistan, has recently teamed up with Green Story, a sustainability analytics platform with expertise in LCAs. Based in Toronto, Canada, and Utrecht in the Netherlands, its services include the creation of a digital product passport with a QR code. This will allow AGI Denim customers to prepare for upcoming legislation and communicate the provenance and journey of its denim products to consumers.

Connecting the dots

While certain phases of the jeans-making process are highly digitised and thus near ESPR-ready, collecting data for other processes, especially the sourcing and processing of natural raw materials, remains a challenge. Here, too, many suppliers of specialised traceability solutions have been founded. These include those that use a physical tracer, such as FibreTrace, ADNAS or Haelixa, and those that rely on forensics, such as Oritain, but they have a small market share.

Future DDPs will require compiling data across an entire supply chain, and will thus require that these varied solutions and technologies can work together, merge and exchange data in a secure, reliable and non-alterable process. Data security is key, but so will be data interoperability. “Interoperability is inevitable,” says Stéphane Popescu, founder of COSE 361, a French sustainability consultancy. “Today, the technologies are not yet mature. But take email. Whatever system you use, gmail, outlook, or whatever, we can send each other emails without ‘interruption’ because service providers have made their platforms interoperable,” he tells Inside Denim. He doesn’t see why impact monitoring and traceability should not be the same, and believes interoperability will be “accelerated by regulations such as the EU’s ecodesign regulation and digital product passport”. A solution provider may want to keep its customers in a closed system, but he says this is “untenable in the long term” and contributes to “traceability fatigue”. While he fears that brands will limit their investment in DPPs to basic compliance requirements, Mr Popescu says “companies should use ESPR and DPP as a means of adding value, whether economic or intangible, to strengthen their position on the market.”
Future legislation will benefit companies that have made the most progress in their sustainability strategies and have the data to back up their claims. Nicolaj Reffstrup, co-founder of Ganni, sees DPPs not only as an opportunity to increase the level of information and transparency a company offers its consumers, but also as an opportunity to manage product sustainability data more efficiently. “It is easy to see the hurdles and uncertainties, but we should all be excited about the data shift that will happen in the coming years. The quicker you prepare for compliance, the smoother the transition will be for you and your customers,” he says.

Imposing that products display their sustainability score will create a level playing field for the industry. It should also have a positive impact on suppliers, as instead of having to provide specific data for each individual customer’s sustainability requirements, a single standardised set for all would streamline their obligations. Digital product passports could then also be a mill’s sesame moment to a lighter compliance load.

Tonello’s Metro platform monitors impacts and delivers an A-to-F grade for each individual product that has been processed by its equipment. 
Photo credit: Tonello

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