Fashion for Good and Textile Exchange have jointly released ‘The Textile Tracer Assessment’, a detailed guide of physical tracer technologies applicable to the textile supply chain. The assessment provides fashion ecosystem stakeholders with an overview to evaluate and determine which tracer technologies would best suit their sustainability and operational needs.
This guide assesses promising physical tracer technologies applicable for improving traceability verification in the textile industry. Today, there is a lack of reliable verification for fibres, materials, and finished products. Scaling and further implementation of physical tracer technologies can help to address key industry challenges for traceability and help authenticate sustainability standards and certification.
The Textile Tracer Assessment is a tool for stakeholders across the supply chain from suppliers, to brands, to certification bodies, who are motivated to explore and implement physical tracer technologies to supplement existing traceability models.
Current chain-of-custody processes fall short in physical/material authentications which may lead to false claims and the sourcing of fibres and materials with unchecked environmental risks. This report addresses the key challenges in both categories of tracer technologies, as well as how and where best they can be applied to strengthen chain-of-custody models and fibre/material integrity. Tracer technologies can only facilitate the flow of information, and thus should be considered within a wider context of sustainability strategy. Physical tracer technologies work best when implemented in tandem with digital traceability, and are key to supplement site-level verification, and transactional-level verification providing robust, holistic and future-proofed traceability governance.
