Pivotal Tech in Extraordinary Times

This is a moment of incredible uncertainty, and there is no precise map charting the way forward. It’s impossible to know exactly what the landscape of industry trends, titans, and underdogs will look like once the world is opened back up and quarantines become a distant memory.

Soon we will have significant, industry defining choices to make. Brands, retailers, and suppliers will need to choose how and where to invest their time and resources in order to both recover in the near term and thrive as time goes on. Over the past few years, the call for a transformation of our industry has been loud and clear. Choosing to invest in two types of pivotal technologies at this unprecedented moment will shape the future for the better.

Fiber recycling and digital technologies have made significant advances toward a lower impact, more transparent supply chain. They enable us to reduce our reliance on finite resources and increase accountability during product creation, respectively. Adopting them as we reboot the industry will accelerate our progress toward circularity faster than ever before.

From a recycling perspective, cotton is still king. Mechanical cotton recycling is a tried and true method for bringing cotton waste back to the front of the supply chain, and chemical cellulosic innovations (those who break down cotton, viscose, and other cellulose-based waste to be extruded into new fiber) are leading the recycling technology development race. Circulose? has now joined Refibra? and others in consumers’ hands, and new options are coming up fast. Cellulosic focused solutions are the first big wave of chemical textile to textile recycling technologies to commercialize, and water-intensive waste cotton is their feedstock of choice.

Technologies equipped to chemically recycle cotton / polyester blends are positioned to form the second wave of commercially available options. Worn Again opened their pilot plant in January of this year, Tyton recently received a big investment from Patagonia’s Tin Shed Ventures, and other blend-focused technologies are also making strides. Polyester focused techs are not third in line, but rather a slightly different animal, because of the existing bottle to fiber recycling infrastructure, the influence of the packaging industry in the rPET textile fiber market, and the distribution of polyester rich textile waste (which is a little different than other fibers). Solutions for chemically recycling polyester textiles are either available or are developing rapidly, including RENU?, new technology from Eastman, and developments from GR3N.

Recycling is an increasingly viable option, and it’s critical to invest heavily in recycled fibers in order to continue to support this trend and achieve circularity. Doing so will increase market pull for low-impact fiber options and bring commercial and developing technologies forward. It also drives the transition away from our excessive use and the subsequent waste of finite resources, helping to address the disproportionate impact fashion and textiles have on the climate. Recycled fiber is a powerful choice for circular textiles, and it demonstrates to consumers that brands and retailers care about the future just as much as margins.

A number of digital technologies have been carving out a place in the supply chain, as well. Now that sustainability initiatives have grown beyond maximizing linear efficiency into establishing circular practices, the ability to verify, trace, and connect is becoming a must-have for both supply chains and product. This has led to fiber-level tracers, SaaS traceability platforms, and digital tags joining PLMs, ERPs, and other familiar digital tools to drive the future of textiles.

Fiber tracers are embedded at the fiber production stage and typically stay in place all the way through product creation and usage. This makes it possible to authenticate materials from either the raw material supplier or the fiber producer forward, weed out fraudulent usage claims, and validate sustainability certifications such as recycled content. Repreve?, EcoVero?, Livaeco?, and others make use of this technology today, and companies like Applied DNA Sciences offer the molecular identifiers for use in a variety of industries.

When data from fiber tracer verification is integrated into a traceability platform, these technologies open up opportunities for fiber suppliers to build new types of relationships. This is because once their product is incorporated into a larger digital system, the fiber producers’ reach and visibility expand significantly. It’s already possible to have consumer-level exposure though some of the systems mentioned below, and with the right infrastructure, the combination of fiber tracers with other digital technologies could enable fiber producers to put a finger on their resources through multiple product cycles. This creates a tremendous opportunity for them to develop new, circular business models.

Traceability platforms are another powerful circular system enabler. They can be blockchain based or not, industry specific or cross-sectoral, trace a few or multiple steps of the supply chain, and / or have consumer facing components. They typically work by establishing a network of trusted partners, validating the transfer of goods or use of services through physical scanning or digital paper trail validation, and providing a record of these validated transactions to the stakeholders on the platform. Physical scanning can be done with QR or bar codes, NFC chips, and the like, and stakeholders with access might include certification bodies, suppliers, brands and retailers, or consumers.

While there are a growing number of options developing to address the traceability challenge of textiles (ie: TrusTrace, Bext360, and many others), the common focus for the vast majority is a SaaS offering to brands. In the short term, this is a logical business model for such a solution. It is likely to be a barrier to widespread adoption among suppliers in the long term, however, if this causes brands to lock into digital silos. There is no doubt traceability platforms are an important piece of a circular industry, because it’s possible to set them up in a way that provides visibility from raw material through consumer usage cycles and back again. In order for them to truly maximize their potential to improve the industry, though, traceability platforms must have some degree of inter-operability.

For example, if a garment supplier has 3 different customers using 3 different traceability platforms, it could mean the supplier has to incorporate 3 different traceability processes into their workflow. This adds to an already long list of duplicative requirements for suppliers who hold sustainability certifications, use the HIGG index, and comply with in-house brand and retailer sustainability programs. A similar scenario is likely for those supplying recycling feedstocks. That’s risky, because companies that manage textile waste already operate on razor-thin margins, and they can’t afford to lose efficiency. If suppliers are expected to do the right thing (and they should be), it’s highly counter-productive to add unnecessary barriers for them. Some level of inter-operability between digital systems, such as streamlining at the supplier level, will enable broader adoption of traceability platforms within the supply chain.

Another potentially game-changing solution is digital tagging systems. While this type of technology is also being developed by multiple stakeholders, the general concept is the same: Put a digital tag on a finished product that contains information about the materials, suppliers, product itself, item value, and compatibility for recycling; with this information tied to individual garments, cycling products and resources in a circular system becomes hyper accurate and efficient. Circular.Fashion, EON, and RI.SE are all working toward solutions for this new framework. It is seen as a promising future solution for product handling and distribution, consumer engagement, reuse, and recycling all rolled into one, because every stakeholder from the original garment supplier through reuse and recycling companies can get value from the data on the digital tags and from the platform(s) that enable them. Traceability platforms and their data from the garment supplier backward could also be connected.

Digital tagging is a great idea with a lot of potential, especially if the various systems have a shared nomenclature and list of data points to be included on the tags and their driving platforms. Aligning on these fundamental details will enable products to cycle through a circular supply chain without unnecessary data translation hurdles or mis-matches. This is important for any company dealing with multiple brands’ products, from garment suppliers and retailers to reuse and recycling actors. Technology should be an enabler that efficiently delivers accurate information and steers product through multiple usage cycles according to their highest use value. If these solutions are siloed, it will be impossible to implement them effectively at scale. Like transparency platforms, competing digital tagging systems should conform to some level of standardization while carving out their unique value proposition.

We need digital technologies to achieve a circular textile industry, because they enable stronger connections across a broader network. They increase accountability, verify authenticity, and deliver extreme amounts of information about a single product through multiple usage cycles. Recycling technologies have a natural fit alongside digital solutions in a circular system, because they are the only loop that physically connects end-of-life product to front of the supply chain to displace virgin resources. Tying these two solutions together means textile resources can remain in circulation for an extremely long time, and long term business relationships can be built upon their exchange instead of the one-time production and sale of individual items.

The unexpected disruption around the world right now has provided an opportunity to pause and consider the type of future we want to step into. The choice to invest in these technologies would be an enormous catalyst for circularity. Consider this scenario: More recycled fibers are used in products that are rented, leased, or otherwise resold, so the brand and retailers’ cost of regenerated raw materials is amortized over multiple product cycles. New business models are now incorporated into a brand or retailer’s strategy while reducing the over-consumption inherent in yesterday’s linear system. Recyclers see an increase in market pull and can increase capacity to achieve economies of scale. Items circulating in the system become connected with digital technology. Widespread traceability in the supply chain and post-consumer textile recycling become viable, scalable options. The increase in clothing and textile reuse and recycling creates jobs in logistics, waste management, and recycling at a regional and global level. The negative environmental impact of textiles and fashion is dramatically decreased, opportunities for people around the world grow, and textiles and fashion get back to profitable business. That is just about as circular as it gets.

The elephant in the room is the short term economic cost of such choices when the prospect of profitability for brands, retailers, and suppliers in 2020 is very grim. Up until this point, “linear”, “wasteful”, and “race to the bottom” were accurate characterizations of our industry. While there have been incremental steps toward sustainable solutions in the past few years, the shift away from the linear habit has been very slow. Now global pandemic has forced an immediate change. Factories are closing, layoffs are imminent, and executives are tightening their belts.

On the other hand, a lack of access to physical retail has driven the bulk of our consumption online, and capacity to pick, pack, and deliver products to consumers at home has ramped up. Some production factories have switched, seemingly overnight, to producing PPE and other medical supplies. Nearly everyone who is used to going into an office has made the transition to working from home, often juggling kids and family needs alongside professional commitments. What the last few weeks have delivered, in addition to a lot of uncertainty, is the proof that we can do things differently. With an investment in the right systems and a commitment to the wellbeing of one another, it is possible to carry on.

Circularity is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s an investment that demands patience, because achieving returns of this size take time. The circular dividend is three-fold: human, environmental, and economic. This is investment opportunity that comes along once, and we can't afford to miss it. With that kind of value behind us, our industry will thrive, whatever challenges come in the future.

When the doors on our homes and businesses open again, there will be significant, industry defining choices to make. Instead of reverting completely to the old way, let’s start to put more recycled fibers and circular products in the market. Let’s apply digital technology to products, supply chains, and raw materials and profit from multiple product cycles instead of falling back into the archaic, cheap, high-volume, linear take-make-discard model. Let’s reboot and rise from the ashes a phoenix… resilient and better than ever.