In 2020, Swedish essentials brand Asket will tag each item in its luxury basics collection with an ‘Impact Receipt’ that tallies the greenhouse gas emissions, water and energy used in manufacturing and transporting each item. set as a goal.
Like most fashion brands, Asket does not own the factories that make its garments and spends years creating and delivering each thread, button and zipper to feed the actual data into its impact calculations. I followed it carefully. The company, in collaboration with a Swedish research institute, was piloting evaluations of its flagship products: t-shirts, oxford shirts, chinos and merino wool sweaters.
But extending this project to all of the company’s products turned out to be even more complicated than it sounded.
Mapping a brand’s supply chain was one thing; capturing and managing the data needed for impact assessment was another.
In many cases, the information was outdated by the time the team scrutinized the numbers. Also, the company does not have its own primary data, and deciding which dataset to use to calculate raw material footprints can fundamentally change a product’s final impact score. It was a daunting task.
“It gets very complicated,” says Asket co-founder August Bard Bringéus. “It was out of proportion.”
Last year, the brand partnered with carbon measurement platform Vaayu to help tackle this challenge. The tech startup, whose clients include second-hand marketplace Vinted, underwear brand Organic Basics, and fintech firms Stripe and Klarna, relies on AI to help companies perform complex calculations about their carbon footprint. This year, Asket finally rolls out emissions receipts for all products.
Vaayu is one of the rapidly emerging digital platforms as the industry faces a looming onslaught of sustainability regulations. They promise neat high-tech solutions to thorny problems. However, to work effectively in practice, the underlying data that it relies on to inform impact assessments needs to be further improved.
“A completely new dataset”
The fashion industry is just beginning to experiment with technology tools that help map, manage, interpret and present critical information about brands’ sustainability efforts. But you have to act quickly.
About 40 different regulations will come into force over the next four years, according to Jocelyn Wilkinson, a partner at consulting firm BCG, all of which will lead to greater transparency for brands and a better understanding of their environmental impact. It is said that it will happen.
Companies already meet the demands of new U.S. and European legislation, from stricter requirements to prove that products are not made with forced labor, to mandatory disclosure of information about the environmental impact of their products. I am struggling with To keep up with all the upcoming new regulations, companies will need to track about 70 different data points, many of which are simply not collected at this time, Wilkinson said.
“What we are talking about is a completely new dataset,” said Fairy Maid, a Paris-based traceability and sustainability measurement platform used by companies such as LVMH, Patou and SMCP. Founder Camille Le Gal said. “What has changed is [before] The purpose of this data was … really to satisfy the consumer, but now it is a matter of satisfying the government. “
Today’s service providers offer a range of solutions that help companies efficiently comply with new regulations and make smart decisions to meet their climate goals.
The idea is to connect these tools to brands’ existing systems so that they can scrape whatever data is available to them while contacting suppliers and uploading additional information. We use smart algorithms to collate and validate data, comparing, for example, a supplier’s claim that cotton is organic to a database of certified mills. Finally, all that information is processed to produce impact calculations in a format that companies can use to inform more responsible design choices, communicate with customers, and satisfy regulators.
In fact, very few fashion brands today are built to be capable of such functionality.
high tech, low tech
Most fashion companies have limited visibility into their supply chains, so the information they need to feed into these new tech tools is patchy at best. The data that actually exists is often a mess and requires painstaking work to clean it up and start managing it consistently. Typically, the deeper you go into the supply chain, the slower the development of data management systems and the greater the environmental impact of the processes performed.
“The data gap is pretty big,” said Worldly, chief technology officer of Worldly, a for-profit data platform formerly known as Higg Inc., spun out of industry group Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC). One John Armstrong said: low-tech, human-centered problems, [but] Data contextualization is a very high-tech problem. “
Closing the gap is a difficult process and takes time. For example, when Fairly Made introduces a new brand, most of the initial time is spent communicating with the supplier and explaining why they are requesting new data in a different format.
“The hardest part is gathering information,” Ru Gal said. On average, it takes her four to five weeks to collect primary data from factories, but analyzing that data takes minutes, she said.
The rapid succession of data requests is a complex, costly and time-consuming burden for suppliers, with nuances specific to many types of businesses. Sri Lanka-based Selyn Textiles, for example, works with home handloom weavers to produce fabrics, but the impact is not concentrated at one of his factories, further complicating the data collection effort. increase.
“Data collection is a big problem,” says co-founder and managing partner Selina Peiris.
The emerging technology platform claims to meet companies where they are and help them model useful information about their impact. For example, Vaayu uses AI to mine existing databases and reverse engineer the carbon footprint of their products using whatever information is available. A brand knows that a t-shirt was sewn in a factory in Cambodia using cotton from a factory in China. Vaayu’s algorithm considers the most relevant existing impact assessments for both countries’ grid his mixes and cotton to produce emissions estimates.
Each calculation is accompanied by an accuracy score, so if your carbon footprint looks high or your accuracy score is low, brands should know where to focus their efforts to improve their impact and what information is available. said Vaayu co-founder Namrata Sandhu.
Watershed, a similar platform that worked with companies like Skims, Everlane and Shopify and was valued at $1 billion last year, allows companies to build a complete picture of their carbon footprint with just basic financial data. said. You can then start drilling down to build a better picture.
“It’s important that we don’t set the standard for perfection, because then we’re completely stuck,” said Avi Itzkovic, co-founder of Watershed. “It’s better to have a measurement that’s nearly right than one that’s completely wrong.”
fill the data gap
Last year, the Norwegian Consumer Agency issued a tough stance on how “rogue” companies can be when making sustainability claims.
Market watchdogs believe data on the environmental impact of materials provided by the SAC’s Higg index, one of the industry’s most widely used data tools, can be used to promote products as more sustainable. It shocked the industry by determining that it was misleading if used.
This has sparked debate about the quality of impact data available for materials such as cotton and wool. Many existing datasets are old and based on broad averages, but the footprint of a particular material can vary greatly depending on where and how it was grown.
Country-specific gridded data have less variability, making them a more reliable proxy, but still yielding a skewed image. Asket has worked hard to gain an extraordinary level of visibility into its supply chain, but will not use primary data to set baselines in its first year of working with Vaayu. selected. The resulting calculations were found to “greatly overstate” their impact, as the assessment did not take into account the efficiencies introduced by the suppliers.
Technology platforms are working to address gaps and build unique access to valuable data.
Worldly launched a new tool Tuesday that allows manufacturers to upload impact data in real time, rather than responding to an annual survey. The information is verified by the certification company SGS. Watershed last month acquired Vitalmetrics, an emissions accounting and data company that maintains a major emissions database.
The goal of all these efforts is to help brands not only meet regulatory requirements but also manage their impact. To truly understand what is required, much more data collection will be required.
“Primary data is absolutely essential,” says Wilkinson. That doesn’t mean it will reach every field, farm, and factory tomorrow. But in the long term, “brands that underestimate overall averages and estimates are immature in their approach.”
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