Better Cotton, a worldwide cotton certifier and sustainability initiative that has several promo suppliers among its members, has launched a traceability solution for the fashion and textile sectors.

The offering was developed over three years and will provide visibility of cotton’s journey through the supply chain by logging stakeholder input on the Better Cotton Platform, according to the organization.

Better Cotton’s new traceability solution will help brands track the origin of raw materials. (Courtesy of Better Cotton/Eugénie Bacher)

“Traceability at scale for cotton will drive a seismic shift within our industry’s supply chains,” said Alan McClay, CEO of Better Cotton. “Better Cotton’s traceability solution is posed to help the industry deliver that shift. Never before has transparency been as imperative as it is now to our retail and brand members.”

Better Cotton said it worked closely with a network of member retailers and brands, including H&M Group, Marks & Spencer, Walmart, Target and Gap Inc. to ensure that fashion companies can accurately trace and disclose the origin of raw materials and comply with emerging regulations.

Increasingly, companies are expected to verify the origin of raw materials in their products and leverage improved transparency to address the potential adverse effects of their activities on human rights and the environment. Traceability has been a concern in the promotional products industry as well. This summer, Top 40 supplier Gemline (asi/56070), for example, partnered with global textile traceability solution Aware to add supply chain transparency to its MiiR Olympus collection of bags.

Traceable Better Cotton will give retailers and brands confidence that they’re sourcing product from a specific country and establish greater supply chain visibility, enabling them to incorporate insights into their own supply chain due diligence, according to the organization.

In the coming years, Better Cotton said it will scale the availability and sourcing granularity of its traceable cotton to serve as the foundation for an Impact Marketplace to compensate farmers for field-level progress, enable country-level life cycle assessments (LCAs) to calculate the environmental impact of Better Cotton in relation to conventional cotton, and provide credible consumer- and business-facing claims.

Using the Better Cotton Platform – operated by software company ChainPoint – cotton suppliers will log transactional information, culminating in visibility of where Better Cotton originated from and how much is in a particular product. Traceability will span the cotton ginning stage through the final product offered by a retailer or brand, according to Better Cotton.

Better Cotton represents more than one-fifth of global cotton production. The initiative has more than 2,500 members. Among them are promotional products suppliers Threadfast Apparel (asi/91163) and Fruit of the Loom (asi/84257). Shahi, a factory in India that Top 40 supplier SanMar (asi/84863) partners with, is also a Better Cotton member. Last month, J. America (asi/62977) announced that it would be using Better Cotton in some of its apparel styles.

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