Fashion for Good’s Project: Tracing sustainable viscose from fibre to finish

Facilitated by Fashion for Good, the Viscose Traceability Project is a collaboration with leading brands BESTSELLER and Kering who will provide the eight garment styles to be traced for the pilot, with fibres sourced from three leading sustainable viscose producers. TextileGenesisTM will provide their blockchain solution and platform to trace the origins of the viscose used in the garments along the supply chains of the two participating brands. These supply chains, consisting of spinners, weavers, knitters, dye-houses and garment makers, span a total of eight countries to reflect the real-world complexities and various supply-chain scenarios to fully test the flexibility and scalability of the platform.
The project builds upon learnings from the 2019 Organic Cotton Traceability Pilot, which investigated the technical feasibility of blockchain and physical tracers using organic cotton as the primary fibre. The Viscose Traceability Project’s ambitions lie beyond technical feasibility however, going further to explore, in detail, the necessary next steps to making a traceability solution not only effective, but scalable on a sector-wide, commercial level.
Having already demonstrated the technological feasibility of the TextileGenesisTM platform and its ability to integrate chain of custody certification in previous pilots, this project will focus on demonstrating the feasibility of global application of the solution across the viscose supply chain. Success will be measured against the flexibility of the solution – being able to operate across diverse supply chains; the interoperability of the solution – collecting data from multiple platforms into a single system; and scalability – global implementation across multiple brands, fibre producers and supply chains.
The scope of the project focuses on tracing viscose fibres from production to retail. To do so, the project leverages the impactful work of the CanopyStyle initiative to eliminate ancient and endangered forest fibre from viscose production and to bolster adoption of forest certification standards such as FSC, to address traceability in the earlier parts of the supply chain i.e. from forest to viscose fibre production.
The three fibre producers, Lenzing, ENKA and Tangshan Sanyou were selected due to their “Green Shirt” ranking on the Canopy Hot Button Report and reputation as leaders in the sustainability fi eld. Through this consortium platform, Canopy and TextileGenesisTM have further developed their partnership: upgrades of the TextileGenesisTM platform will integrate Canopy hot-button ranking data and next generation viscose lines which will not only be available to the participating pilot brands, but to all other brands using the platform.
Following the completion of the pilot in late 2021, an aggregated report detailing the key findings and best practices will be shared publicly.