Released in The Interline’s Sustainability Report 2024, this executive interview with Oritain is one of an exclusive five-part series that sees The Interline quiz executives from companies who are defining what the foundations and the frontend experiences of sustainability solutions will be.
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Last year, it emerged that “sustainability” was still a useful term for capturing a very complex set of variables and conditions. This year, we want to look at how those different elements are being arranged and prioritised. Upstream visibility and traceability, for instance, is a separate piece of the sustainability puzzle from textile-to-textile recycling, or material science, or the circular economy. With all these different parts vying for brands’ and suppliers’ attention, and legislation adding time and compliance pressure to the mix, how do you believe our readers should be thinking about prioritisation?
Prioritization should be based on company goals, aligned with what is achievable and what is going to drive the best outcomes for near-term objectives. The market at the moment is quite subdued, and there’s material out there that’s more readily available than in the past. So, a sourcing solution for a sustainability pathway seems to have greater advantages in the traceability. For a brand to source something, their suppliers need to source the raw material for it. Today, we’re at a lower point on the supply demand curve, so this is more achievable than it might have been in the last two years. It’s not a case of having one without the other. If you’re going down a sourcing journey for a greater sustainability mix, transparency will give you the confidence that it fits your sustainability goals.
Obviously interventions at every stage of the lifecycle matter, but with materials having such an outsize contribution to how a product performs, how it looks, what it costs to produce, it feels logical to say that they are such a vital part of the product’s makeup overall that they must also be top of the pile when it comes to sustainability. Does that hold true? How much of a given product’s combined environmental and ethical impact is determined at the raw materials stage?
I’d argue that a majority would be established at the raw material stage. You have some choice regarding suppliers and facilities but, as we know, the largest contribution comes from the raw materials chosen for sourcing. Greater weight should be emphasised on the raw material source, as well as selecting the right supply chain partner(s).
For example, cotton is grown under different conditions worldwide, each with varying impacts on sustainability. The origin of the cotton, how it is cultivated, and the resources used – like water and pesticides – play an important role in determining the overall sustainability of the final product. Oritain takes a scientific, forensic approach to verify the origin of raw materials (like cotton) helping brands source materials from locations with sustainable or ethical practices.
A lot of time and effort is being expended on systems, processes, and technologies designed to track impact data across the extended product lifecycle, but these are only as good as the data that feeds them. So what is the right approach to beginning with rigorous scientific data about the origin of materials? And what impact can getting that method of initial data capture right have on the stages that follow?
The first thing is to define the objective data versus the subjective data. How is that information generated? Is it based on industry published data, objective data or is it relying on subjective evaluations from suppliers and declarations? I think that’s the first question, which is the basis on which you build a system and technology. If your system is based on subjective data, you’re going to get subjective results. If you have a good system grounded in objective information, you are going to get objective outcomes.
My advice would be to look towards technologies and systems that rely on objective information rather than the subjective viewpoint – subjective meaning supplier self-declarations, industry averaging, etc. Objective includes pontific sustainability goals. Any of these initiatives require a win-win situation for both the brand and the supplier. It needs to be beneficial for both parties. If your suppliers are true partners in business, then you must look at it as the potential for a win-win business transaction – particularly in the case of sustainability materials which are at the start of industry uptake. Some suppliers won’t want to take oversize risk into that unless they have a partner that’s going to stand by them for the long term.
Much of the sustainability mandate is being driven by regulations, but the shape of those regulations is not fixed – and complying with them means remaining aware of when the letter of a legislation changes. Isotopic testing is playing a part in this progression, with entities like the European Union, United States, and Canada starting to adopt it as an enforcement mechanism against forced and child labour. How should fashion businesses be thinking about preparing for the future of disclosure and reporting?
They should prepare for the future first with clarity. You don’t want to be in a position whereby you have some general assumptions about what you’re doing and then have to walk it back. You should make commitments on the things that you have strong evidence for, strong objective data for and limit your scope to that and then look to expand that out. It helps no one by making vague commitments that are backed up by vague data.
As well as giving brands a key to tangible evidence around product origins and authenticity, science-backed traceability has the potential to deliver a return on investment in other areas – from risk to efficiency. What is your experience of where the industry is already finding additional value in isotopic testing, and where do you think further value will be found in the near future?
Sourcing needs to be true to source. The UFLPA regulation is around not using origins with certain banned materials in it. Other opportunities are available where you want to be true to source. So, if you’re on the US Cotton Trust Protocol, are you sourcing US cotton? Are you looking to make particular content claims about your material, and how do you back them up? It really comes down to brands wishing to make greater content claims around what they’re doing and that new opportunities are able to be opened up through the use of isotopic testing.
Textile and garment brands are turning to origin fingerprint forensics to authenticate their goods. Country Road, an Australian fashion brand, uses Oritain to scientifically verify the origin of the Australian cotton it uses in its clothing lines. Welspun, one of the world’s largest home textile manufacturers and supplier to top global retailers and hotel chains, uses Oritain to uphold the integrity of their Egyptian cotton supply chain.
With sustainability destined to bring sweeping changes to many different parts of the fashion value chain, it seems inevitable that some (or many) current ways of working will have a limited shelf life. Where do you see the industry changing the fastest and most acutely? What do we take for granted today that’s unlikely to be viable in the future? And how can fashion businesses get ahead of that shift?
I think the reliance on factory auditing as we’re expanding the question set for that tool is going to have a shelf life. Auditing factories first started from understanding about working conditions and environmental credentials around those facilities – that is limited utility when we’re now interested around the nature of the products that flow through those facilities. Programs that rely on indirect measures of sustainability accounting are always going to struggle in the face of a consumer promise, because a consumer is looking for a content claim, not a generalization of a brand’s overall sourcing structure.
Tools and systems that sound great, but that are built on subjective data inputs or subjective decision making also have limited utility. Because there’s limited fundamental basis on what those results can stand behind, and they can put a brand’s position at jeopardy.