New legislative initiatives and directives such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) and the EU Ecodesign Directive require transparency in sourcing and procurement, which should be reflected in the product passport.
Procurement risks and product passports are on everyone’s lips. Product passports promise transparency or a “complete life cycle” in textile procurement, batteries, toys or electronic devices. Procurement risks do not originate at product level but mainly in the material purchased to manufacture a product. Leather, natural fibers or rubber are typical examples of procurement risks such as deforestation or modern slavery.
For the origin of such materials, the product passport only uses data available in the supply chain. The collection of this data for certain due diligence checks are burdensome and usually ends up as a package of tasks with a Tier 1 supplier, who is usually located in the country of production.
“The optical fingerprint is a method of physically marking material alongside other methods such as artificial DNA. The advantage of the optical fingerprint is that it is machine-readable using portable spectroscopy. A specific light excitation elicits a spectral code from an inorganic pigment, which represents the manufacturer or a material quality. For this purpose, the material is homogeneously mixed with the marker”
“Old wine in new bottles” is probably the best description for these efforts. The old certificates and audits, which are based on the same business documents, are only supplemented by a “dashboard-like” visualization and digitization of the existing documents in paper form through scans. It is time for transparency to go beyond Tier 1 and the industry to focus on the true product integrity, namely the material itself, which is a carrier of product authenticity and can prove it at every point in the value chain.
This is where blockchain and similar technologies promise a solution, to ensure material integrity via a mass balance sheet. If you think about such a system in a scaled form for entire branches of industry or sectors, there are doubts whether the materials in the warehouse correspond to their digital twins. What is missing is the possibility to check the material at every point in the supply chain. This inspection must be straightforward. Such a physical inspection must not be allowed to escape a digital context, which is why we also talk about “phygital” solutions when companies use physical markers and digital concepts for the traceability of materials.
The company Tailorlux stands for the implementation of such concepts with the help of spectroscopy. Whether it is the quantification of recycled fibers or the traceability of rubber and plastic – spectroscopy plastics – spectroscopy is the approach from the material perspective that can substantially enrich the product passport.
With the existing transaction certificates based on invoices and delivery bills, the door is wide open to fraud. At the beginning of the year, journalists used an AirTag to demonstrate how fraud is perpetrated when the line between waste and recyclables becomes blurred.
Probably the largest and most problematic market is textile recycling: the recovery of post-consumer recycling is a key pillar of the “EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles”. At the same time, it should no longer be possible in future to dispose of textile waste in third countries. In addition, the proportion of recycled material is to be verified. Tailorlux has created a new reference together with the company Recover that uses physical and digital traceability for full transparency in textile recycling.
For this purpose, tracer fiber is added to recycled cotton in a controlled, automated and documented process known as “shredding”. Each bale is now physically marked and is also digitally recorded as a “twin” of the real product. The marking can be read out using a portable spectrometer. The mixing of these bales in the textile production process can be tracked via a digital platform and confirmed by a laboratory test to create a synergy between physical and digital traceability.
The result is a system that combines the physical tracer with a digital platform, providing the platform and can ultimately provide the data basis for a product passport. Similar synergies also arise with man-made fibers, where a physical tracer can even be quantified without destroying the textile.
The tracer can also be used for rubber, for example to mark material from low-risk production countries. However, spectroscopy can also be a benefit for material authenticity. That is why Tailorlux relies on a combined device with an NIR module (near infrared module). The Tailor-Scan 4 enables spectroscopy even without prior knowledge. For this purpose, Tailorlux relies on a learning database that polymers, textiles, pollutants and even foodstuffs.
This means that materials can also be identified by users who have no prior knowledge of spectroscopy. The device thus combines digital traceability with data about the material that was procured. As a result, every product passport could be enriched with sensor data from the supply chain could be enriched and validated. This is a real advantage for greenwashing protection, customer information and, above all, product circularity. The benefits of physical marking and spectroscopy for homogeneous sorting of high-quality fractions are just being discovered.
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