By PAGE Editor

After a year of collaborative development, Textile Exchange and TextileGenesis™ are pleased to announce the pilot release of Textile Exchange's Electronic Trackit "eTrackit" program – a digital system for granular traceability using innovative technologies applied to Textile Exchange Standards.

The pioneering system creates detailed material accounting of certified materials at the article level across the supply chain enabling peer-to-peer validation and leveraging third-party Certification Bodies in the transaction verification process.

The pilot program will be released in November at Textile Exchange's annual global conference in Dublin, and the first phase will focus on the Global Recycled Standard (GRS) and the Recycled Claim Standard (RCS).

"In an industry's first, supply chain transactions along with a product level chain of custody will be verified digitally on the platform. eTrackit provides an alternative to the PDF-based transaction certificates, tracking each product's volume of certified material entirely online via e-tokens. Our aim is that this technology accelerates positive impacts throughout the supply chain while also providing brands with the verified data they need to confidently make product claims," says Claire Bergkamp, COO of Textile Exchange.

Seven global brands, including Bestseller, H&M Group, Inditex, tentree and VF Corporation, will pilot this innovative traceability system for GRS and RCS certified materials across their supply chains. Participating certification bodies include Control Union, USB Certification, IDFL, Intertek and Bureau Veritas. After these pilots, scaling programs will be designed to facilitate a rollout on a commercial level.

The traceability system will be further expanded to cover the animal fiber standards, followed by the Organic Cotton Standard (OCS) in 2022.

"H&M Group believe that supply chain traceability and transparency should go hand-in-hand to create greater accountability for where materials and product come from, and to drive positive change in the fashion industry. Moreover, we believe that we can have greater impact by working together within and across industries to come up with shared solutions; combining technologies and shared-industry databases can help increase supply chain traceability. We are excited to be part of this great collaboration, as it is an important innovation towards digitizing chain of custody and traceability, making the tracing of certified materials easier for all supply chain actors alike and furthering transparency,"

notes Merel Krebbers, Product Owner at H&M Group Business Tech.

Amit Gautam, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of TextileGenesis™ says, "With increasing consumer demand and compliance risks, CEOs and Boards of the majority of top 100 fashion brands have committed to using sustainable fibers over the next five years, with transparency and traceability being a core part of business priorities. Sustainability and traceability have become deeply interconnected, and it's great to see Textile Exchange paving the way for the entire fashion industry to follow. Our supply chain traceability platform creates robust and scalable material accounting at the product-article and lot-level for Textile Exchange's fiber standards using our Fibercoins™ traceability technology."

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