Otis Robinson speaks with Danielle Statham, co-founder of FibreTrace, about the company’s unique solution to enable cotton traceability.
Good practice gives critical advantage over competitors, particularly in industries like fashion that are dominated and steered by public discourse and opinion, which currently focuses heavily on environmental impact.
Unfortunately, this has led to some ‘tricky little marketing campaigns’ and ‘great spins’ on how some companies are more sustainable ‘than the person next door’, says Danielle Statham, co-founder of traceability company FibreTrace.
This greenwashing is detrimental to authentic actors of good practice in the industry, particularly in the complex and controversial cotton sector, where truly sustainable businesses are swallowed up by the negative press around bad practices, she suggests.
But traceability can help to clear up the smoke. According to the United Nations Global Compact, traceability means identifying the history, distribution, location and application of materials – and the addition of this data to the competitive cotton sector could hit back at false claims of sustainability.
“Data is really the key to negating greenwashing,” says Statham. “If you’ve got real data, you can’t argue with the facts.”
Lock and key
Statham, who worked in the fashion industry and studied the trade, and her husband, David, had been cotton farmers for a number of decades before co-founding FibreTrace along with other ‘industry experts’. Statham says the pair were very proud farmers who would sow seeds, grow, gin and ship cotton around the globe. But in 2016, the cotton industry faced criticism for its lack of traceability. It did not go unnoticed by Statham, too, who notes that she could “never get the cotton back onto [their] own doorstep”. Very quickly, difficulty tracking cotton translated into an impossibility of verifying where and how the cotton had been grown – any evidence of their good practice was hidden.
“We were quite unhappy about this, to say the least, because we knew that as Australians we are very proud of the way in which we grow our cotton,” Statham explains. “We felt that story had to be told.”
Consequently, the pair sought to market these stories, and share with industry the many cotton farmers who provide the fibre under best practice – while doubly offering a way to track the journey of cotton throughout the supply chain. The endeavour proved serendipitous. Prior to 2016, a UK-based inventor – now head of research and development (R&D) at FibreTrace – named Paul Stenning had begun working with the International Cotton Association’s (ICA) Bremen Institute in Germany to transform paper security technology into something applicable to textile fibres.
“If you’ve ever seen someone pop a hundred dollar bill under a [black] light to test whether it’s a counterfeit or a real note, it is that technology that FibreTrace is based on, but to be able to sit inside a fibre and remain there through the whole process of the garment industry,” Statham explains. Through collaborative work with the ICA, the team – now going by FibreTrace – had a new luminescent technology solution under their wing to bring to the cotton, garment and home textile industries.
The patented technology, a trackable, luminescent pigment, is an earth mineral that is ‘encapsulated within a fibre’ before joining the ginning or spinning process. “We have a proprietary technology that feeds the pigment into the bale of cotton (or any natural or man-made fibre) at less-than what is considered contamination level, so it’s less than dust, and sits within the fibre and travels through the supply chain,” Statham says. Down the supply chain, as the fibres are transformed into textiles and garments, the pigment can be sensed by proprietary and calibrated scanners to mark its position and log the information into a third-party blockchain.
It’s a lock and key solution, Statham says: the trackable pigments are the lock, while the scanners act as the key to input and unlock data. For brands, this means they are able to confirm the authenticity and history of their fibres. The use of this technology also allows organisations to upload information on their facilities’ environmental standards to facilitate an informative supply chain. Statham even notes that the technology aids contemporary circular economy trends like reuse and recycle business models within the fashion industry.
Demand
The solution comes at an important time, Statham says. Not only has demand for cotton traceability risen in Australia – where there is a thirst for transparency among post-pandemic and young consumers – but for the entire globe under the Covid-19 pandemic.
“People want to look behind the curtain and understand where things come from,” she adds. “There’s a few home truths that are being revealed [about the fashion industry] at the moment.
“Transparency and traceability were spoken about [long] before the pandemic, however, I think this has sped up a lot of that conversation, and we’re in a sector where we need to have results that are increasingly positive.”
This is reflected in FibreTrace’s latest business activity. The company recently launched its first brand partnership with Nobody Denim, which produced a capsule collection of traceable garments whereby consumers can follow the journey of the ‘truly sustainable, carbon positive cotton’ used in the collection.
And FibreTrace, available globally, will not stop at cotton. Statham claims the company has successfully proven FibreTrace to work in all natural and man-made fibres and has commenced a handful of pilots to test these applications.
“We would like to be able to see FibreTrace as the most valued standard in information technology in the raw fibre, textile & garment industry.
“We want to be able to make a difference for the industry as a whole.”
