Making the textile supply chain more respectful of sentient beings and the environment is one of the challenges of sustainable fashion, particularly in terms of raw materials traceability. Blockchain, chemical markers, forensic analysis, artificial intelligence…, Le Boudoir Numérique takes stock of technological advances in this area, in the company of Marie Montliaud, specialist in innovation and sustainable development, until recently at the french Federation of knitwear, lingerie and swimwear. Interview.

By Ludmilla Intravaia 

Le Boudoir Numérique : We met at an Impact conference (more info below) in which you participated on the supply chain of the textile sector, to help brands reduce their social and environmental impacts. What challenges do fashion companies face in building a more responsible supply chain ?

Marie Montliaud, specialist in innovation and sustainable development : First of all, they are not always aware of the fact of being exposed to CSR risks (corporate social responsibility by which they take into account the ethical and social issues of their activities, AN) or in wich manners they are. Often, through their contractual relationships, by visiting their suppliers, they have the impression that, more or less, everything is fine. However, it is essential to verify, on a human level, that fundamental conditions are respected, such as the absence of forced labor in factories or unsafe working conditions. It’s important to ensure that people working in garment or dyeing workshops, where they are for example subjected to chemical risks, are living in health and safety conditions sufficient to prevent disease and injuries, that they do a correct number of hours in order to avoid exhaustion and that they are paid a fair price. It is also necessary to take into account the environmental impact of the production, for instance the discharge of polluting dyes into the aquatic environment or the impact of raw materials, by checking how they are sourced.

What about animal suffering ?

The intensification of the production of materials such as wool, which formerly required time, involves risks of mistreatment of animals, because mowing is done faster and faster, because animals are raised on increasingly smaller grounds, where they are more and more stressed. To increase yields, animal welfare is not taken into account. Practices such as mulesing, removing the skin around the anus of sheeps to avoid the laying of parasites in these wet areas of the body, should in no case continue to exist. These are the types of problems to be solved today and the concerns to be taken into account when sourcing animal materials : avoid all forms of barbaric practices, check farms as much as possible, demand guarantees and impose animal welfare criteria to be respected, the problem being the difficulty in assessing the suffering of animals, on which they cannot testify by themselves and which is more a matter of each person's affect and values. In particular, humans are more sensitive to the suffering of mammals than to that of reptilian species or insects, for example.

One of the tools for a more respectful supply chain is traceability. What is it about ?

Traceability consists in starting from the raw material to follow it, throughout its transformation until the finished product, to have the passport of the product, to know where it went. Traceability in sustainable development makes it possible to say if my T-shirt was really produced with organic cotton. Consumers often find it very difficult to understand that a brand is not able to say whether the cotton in its T-shirts is organic or not. One imagine that you can follow the cotton, as if it had been picked in his field by a small craftsman in the depths of India, then spun and woven at home. Certainly, it is possible with a label like Biore which has developed its own responsible textile value chain to follow materials, from the local producer up to the finished product. But currently, traceabilities are partial. The goal is to globalize them.

Can technology prove useful in order to achieve that ?

Technology has a role to play in fashion traceability. New disruptive technologies allow data from different actors to be entered more easily into a digital supply chain, where it is verified by all the other members of the chain. This is the concept of Blockchain (database for storing and transmitting information, without control by a third party outside the chain, AN). The blockchain therefore offers a secure digital traceability tool guaranteeing the reliability of the data distributed to all the players and linked to each other, in an inviolable manner.

At the conference you were invited to, you also mentioned the possibility of identifying textile fibers to improve their traceability. How ? 

Synthetic or artificial fibers being manufactured by man, it is possible to endow them, during their creation, with a physical or chemical marker, in order to be able to verify in the laboratory who produced this fiber. Thus, the eco-friendly viscose fiber Lenzing Ecovero can be identified, in this way, in a final product. This is the guarantee for the consumer that his garment contains this specific fiber with less impact on the environment. The fibers can also be treated, for example, embossed, to better authenticate them by microscopic observation. On the other hand, natural materials cannot be modified this way. And nothing looks more like cotton than another cotton, except perhaps for the length of its fiber and its quality. Nevertheless, it is possible to determine the chemical footprint of a fiber, its DNA so to speak, depending on where it is grown, the specific components it contains, as does Oritain (company using forensic science to analyze the chemical composition of a material, to determine its origin, NA). One can identify, for example, Nile cotton, in a finished product.

What do you think about artificial intelligence ?

Thanks to visual analysis, artificial intelligence will make it possible to recognize products, by their colors, their materials, etc., using a simple phone camera. But it will require a lot of data crunching (automatic processing of large amounts of data, AN), which will be long. Large groups like IBM are already working on this and, hopefully, with the new quantum computers (calculators which, unlike conventional computers, perform operations on data, based on the laws of quantum physics, AN), it will go much faster.

How do you see the future ?

I think that within five years, the luxe players will have adopted the blockchain. For other players, it will be more complicated, depending on how they can amortize the cost of investing in this technology. In general, business investment is subject to the problem of balance between reputation issues, its advantage for the brand image and financial issues, its affordability, in terms of price. However, I’m positive when I see the growing interest from the press and consumers for traceability and sustainable fashion. The acceleration has been undeniable for a year and a half. The great strength of fashion players is knowing how to follow it. So it will go fast. But fast, how ? Well or not ? This is why it is essential to know precisely what we are talking about and to really take into account all the impacts of what we produce, at each stage of the eco-design of a garment, from its birth to its life end, its disassembly and recycling, all in a reflection on its overall use, until the choice of the machine in which it will be washed which, too, has an impact on the world.

* Websites of the companies mentioned in this article: Remei (Biore), Lenzing Ecovero, Oritain.

* Le Boudoir Numérique met Marie Montliaud during the first edition of the Impact event, dedicated to eco-responsible fashion, as part of the Who’s Next trade fair. The last edition of Impact took place from January 17 to 20, 2020, at Porte de Versailles Exhibition Center, in Paris. On this occasion, Le Boudoir Numérique hosted two conferences on innovation, technology and sustainable fashion. The next edition of Who’s Next will take place from September 4 to 7, 2020. Who’s Next website is here. Impact page is there.

* To find out more about Impact, read this Boudoir Numérique interview with Frédéric Maus, CEO of WSN, the company organizing the event : "Collaborative digital tools can help sustainable fashion".