Barcodes, RFID tags, and QR codes have introduced a new era of on-product information. With many technological solutions and data points in the journey of clothes, should traceability be the norm already? By Pamela Ravasio, CSR and sustainability manager with the European Outdoor Group (EOG).
Many brands and manufacturers are already reliant on digital solutions which could be leveraged to provide increased traceability. These days most supply chain work, to some extent or other, with technical achievements such as globally unique identifiers, barcodes, RFID tags, QR codes, and the electronic exchange of data.
One industry example, the GS1 ‘Global Traceability Standard’ (GTS), is a technical approach that generates visible data for each individual step of the supply chain which could be leveraged for traceability purposes.
The technological standards that have developed from the humble barcode now cover every stage of a product’s supply chain:
- Identification: Standards for the identification of items, locations, shipments, assets that provide unique and complete information for each processing step.
- Capture: Standards for encoding and capturing data in physical data carriers such as barcodes, QR codes, RFID tags etc.
- Share: Standards for sharing and exchanging data between parties in a commonly agreed format and processes.
But how do any of these standards and data formats apply to the textile supply chain? The format of identifiers, physical data carriers, and data interchange methods, are publicly available. What is important to note is that neither barcode nor RFID tag carry the actual data. Instead, they store one of the above identifiers as access to the principle information, which is stored in a suitable IT system.
This means that in order to progress from supply chain visibility to traceability, the data captured at specific steps in the supply chain needs to be stored in a commonly agreed data exchange platform, and then linked.
The information contained in the data trail created by GTS standards is not vetted and is not interpreted. In other words: once linked, the obtained traceability chain does not remove the need for audits that work to confirm the authenticity of organic cotton or other materials.
Traceable cotton t-shirt
An illustrated T-shirt case study (see opposite page) shows how this works in practice. As becomes apparent, the T-shirt’s main components can be tracked back, in a step-by-step process, through to origins of the supply chain.
Here, we can trace back to the facility of the cotton processor. This is also possible if a garment consists of multiple ingredient components; as for instance would be the case for an outdoor jacket that includes zips, buttons, and multiple layers of fabric.
With this kind of information available at each processing step, the only missing piece in this jigsaw is a platform that brings it all together, creating a single, integrated traceability thread.
Once such a system is put in place and integrates all the different pieces of data, and with all the information recorded along the life journey of this T-shirt, it will be possible for end-consumers to identify not only where their T-shirt was sewn, but even from which farm the cotton in the T-shirt originally came from.
A challenging future
Traceability remains a difficult topic. How much detailed data do we need before we can generate meaningful information? And just because we can record information, does this imply that we should do so?
There is no doubt new technologies have progressively come into use at critical supply chain stages: be it for work in progress at the supplier, or in semi- or fully automated warehouses.
There are, however, challenges that come with tracking production.
The apparel industry has a record of drifting towards ever cheaper, and therefore low-tech, sourcing countries. This in turn means that integrated automation will likely not consistently be available, and manual work will be required – annihilating any hope that traceability may ‘efficiently’ and ‘effectively’ become a scaled out reality rather sooner than later.
Acquiring, managing, and using large amounts of data further comes with privacy and usefulness concerns. And is more data really equivalent to more information and insights? It would make sense, it seems, to try and leverage and integrate the already collected information in the best possible way, to enable traceability to reach as far as we can with what we have already.
This article was first published in the October/November 2015 issue of Ecotextile News, page 64. For more information and to subscribe, click here.