Towards a Digital Workflow Solution for Cradle-To-Gate Sustainability Information in Textile Value Chains

Abstract

Sustainability aspects and their verification are becoming indispensable for companies in the textile industry from both an economic and a legal perspective. The reason for this is that there is a large number of different certificates, specifications, and labels, such as Global Organic Textile Standard, Fairtrade, or OekoTex, as well as legislation, such as the German Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains issued in 2021. Hence, the requirements for keeping the proof, e.g. for the batch-accurate world-wide tracing of organic cotton for clothing, or for the necessary transparency to determine the carbon footprint or the recycling percentage, are becoming more and more associated with considerable effort, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Depending on the certificate or specification, SMEs need not only to determine their own sustainability information (gate-to-gate), but also that of the upstream stages of the value chain (cradle-to-gate). The multi-stage value chains of the SME-dominated textile industry, together with the vast and fast-changing variety of materials and products, lead to high complexity in processes and communication. In addition, when confronted with batch-related sustainability criteria and a variety of sustainability and labelling requests from different customers, SMEs have to spend an increasing amount of time and effort on the reliable provision and communication of the respective information. The paper describes the challenges and existing approaches, e.g. the use of blockchain technology, associated with the provision of cradle-to-gate sustainability information in textile SMEs and proposes a holistic framework enabling SMEs along the value chain to configure and implement an infrastructure for efficient, fully digital cloud-ready workflow, based on process models and textile product master trees, in order to address these challenges.