Contribution of traceability towards attaining sustainability in the textile sector

Sustainability has been highlighted as a growing concern to the textile sector, given a fierce use of natural resources and exposure of penurious labor condition (Johansson and Månsson 2013). While natural fiber cultivation involving pesticides results in decreased soil fertility and water pollution, the textile industry is a prevalent contributor to serious health issues and environmental concerns including water and air pollutions (Strähle et al. 2015). The industrial processes consume huge amount of water and discharge pollutants, which significantly contribute the environment footprints (Pedersen and Andersen 2015). Additionally, the emergence of fast fashion has reduced the apparel life cycle, amplified the demand for clothing items, and increased the pressure on natural resources (Khurana and Ricchetti 2016; Steinberger et al. 2009). Subsequently, sustainability has become an important issue for the textile industry as well as for the consumers (Goswami 2014; Goworek 2011). Consumer demand for sustainable products has seen a steady increase along with their curious attitude for knowing sustainability practices in textile production and supply chains (Goswami 2014). Besides this, many non-profit organizations have indulged in name and shame campaigns which identify the malpractices carried out by the brand or their suppliers and then publicly calling their names, thus, severely affecting the brand image. Due to this, organizations are becoming more concerned to sustainability aspect in their business practices and conveying this information to the consumer. More and more companies are using corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports illustrating their efforts for sustainability (Kozlowski et al. 2012). In addition, from the marketing perspective, sustainability acts as a tool to create a competitive edge by highlighting the sustainability practices.

Sustainability or sustainable development is defined as “Economic and social development that meets the needs of the current generation without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). This definition combines economic, social, and ecological aspects together under the umbrella of sustainability and has been widely used in the literature. The retail brands use different techniques to convey the sustainability information to consumers in various forms, which include certification from third party, special logos, and traceability information (Henninger 2015). A lot of research in the past has been focused to attain sustainable supply chain network from technical and organizational aspects (Chi 2011; Cucchiella et al. 2012; De Brito et al. 2008; Nagurney and Yu 2012; Seuring and Müller 2008).From the technical aspect, certifications and indices designate the product in a certain category such as organic or fair production practice while a detailed information of sustainability practices or influencing factors go missing (Goswami 2014). Concerning this, traceability has emerged as a feasible solution which can not only be used to indicate the environmental sustainability aspect of the product but also other customer-concerned tangible and intangible product characteristics such as source of individual raw material used in production, history of individual component, and product footprints in the supply chain can be conveyed to the end-users (Agrawal et al. 2016; Goswami 2014; Guercini and Runfola 2009; Henninger 2015; Kumar et al. 2016). Furthermore, traceability acts as a valuable mean to verify the product related sustainability claims, thus helping companies to advance their sustainability goals (A report by UN Global Compact Office 2014). To make accountable claims such as product life cycle impact or social impact, it is imperative that all product aspects including production history, raw materials information, logistics data, etc. are properly recorded and are verifiable. In this context, traceability is irrefutably required in the industry, which connects various supply chain stakeholders and facilitates the information exchange pertaining to the product. Additionally, government regulations have mandated the traceability in some sectors of textile to implement traceable sourcing information about the supplies (Alves et al. 2013). In this direction, the aim of this conceptual paper is to comprehensively investigate the contribution of traceability towards attaining sustainability in the textile sector. Here, the discussion is made based upon the literature review of scientific and non-scientific literature which was related to traceability and sustainability in textile sector.

Textile industry is one of the jobs creating industries in the less economically developed countries. In the year 2000, the textile industry had employed 25.6 million people and contributed nearly 6% world production among all manufacturing sectors globally (Allwood et al. 2006). Textile production generally requires a semi-skilled workforce; therefore, it opens high employment opportunities for developing countries with a large unskilled workforce and helps in social development. For example, Nicita and Razzaz (2003, p. 5) reported an expected average improvement of 24% in purchasing power of individuals employed in T&C sector in Madagascar. Low wages and relaxed environmental conditions have further encouraged enterprises to move towards the developing countries, which contribute to lowering the product cost. Moreover, due to comparatively low capital investments and high employability, textile industry directly or indirectly contributes towards the social development of many low-income countries.

From the sustainability perspective, the textile industry is a highly criticized sector. It is regarded as one of the highly polluting, resource consuming and labor intensive industries (De Brito et al. 2008). Due to involvement of numerous stakeholders—including different suppliers, fiber producers, yarn manufacturers, weavers, chemical processors, apparel industries, retailers, logistics and distributor partners, post-consumer actors, and service providers—it is a complicated sector where supply chain actors do not always act with good intention towards sustainability (Shih and Agrafiotis 2015). On the other hand, the textile production processes intensively use chemicals and water, which generate a high environmental impact. The chemical compounds such as dyes are not completely utilized and get washed away with the effluents (Islam and Khan 2014). The non-biodegradable and carcinogenic components of these chemicals directly contaminate the nearby water resources and affect the locality severely (Hessel et al. 2007). Further, the recently emerged concept of fast fashion has reduced the cloth and fashion lifecycle, thus, amplified the textile demand. The fiber consumption has almost doubled in mere 20 years, i.e., from 1990 to 2010 (Khurana and Ricchetti 2016). From the raw material perspective, cotton—accounts for the largest portion of natural fibers consumption—involves the consumption of a high amount of water, insecticides, and pesticides and uses a significant portion of cultivable land (Hessel et al. 2007). Further, with growing competition and push for low-cost product, the textile and fashion sector is in limelight for various unethical practices such as use of transgenic cotton, poor environment and working condition, unethical sourcing and manufacturing. Nevertheless, a strong movement has gained pace forcing the organizations to find socially acceptable and eco-friendly solutions while fulfilling their economic expectations (Wigley et al. 2012).

Due to growing concerns from governments and consumers, sustainability has emerged as a key issue for all the textile industries (Kozlowski et al. 2012; Strähle et al. 2015). Profound researches have been undertaken in the last decade to achieve a balance between sustainability and business needs. Besides, sustainability has also emerged as an important marketing tool, genuinely used to uplift the brand’s image and identity. De Brito et al. (2008) described sustainability “as a springboard to reach environmental and socially conscious customers”. Organic fiber labels, green certifications, traceability numbers, etc. are few examples which are widely used to convey sustainability aspect of raw materials or final products to other supply chain members or the end-users (Henninger 2015). However, most of the above initiatives are incomplete or inappropriate without transparency in the supply chain.

From a customer perspective, sustainability is an informational aspect of the product which describes the product’s relation with the basic components of sustainability, namely, ecological, societal, and economic. Organic cotton, green chemistry-based processes, and the use of clean energy sources contribute towards the ecological perspective while fair trade in cotton production, textile manufacturing, etc. contribute to the societal and economic perspectives. In the textile supply chain, brand owners act as resellers and production activities are outsourced to subcontractors or suppliers which carry the main production activities and selection of raw materials and chemicals (Lam and Postle 2006). Therefore, the sustainability aspect is largely defined by these suppliers and subcontractors working together to attain the sustainability goal (Germani et al. 2015). However, as the brand owners cannot verify all sustainability claims by lab-based experimental (such as the verification of organic cotton (Bureau Veritas2010)), it is important that they gather all product related traceability information to make a claim. Similarly, the societal and economic aspects need product information systematically retained to validate the claim (Johansson and Månsson 2013). Hence, the relevant traceability information acts as an integral part of sustainability and subsequently, the product-related data needed to deliver to make accountable claim pertaining to the sustainability (Johansson and Månsson 2013).

As aforementioned, textile sector is long criticized for sustainability. Big fashion brands are being consistently exposed for unsustainable practices including child labor, use of fake organic cotton, marginal salary of workers to name a few (Seuring and Müller 2008). Despite the long-standing concern, according to Khurana and Ricchetti (2016), the sustainability awareness in textile sector is still in “statu nascenti”. Sustainability without the traceable information can be attributed as mere “green washing” which can be used as a marketing tool to gain customers attention, but the real impact remains unknown. For instance, a well known fashion brand has been accused of using child labor in the farming of organic cotton (Phelan 2011), which is partly sustainable from the ecological perspective if compared with the conventional cotton, but the involvement of child labor makes it contrary. The statu nascenti state of sustainability can be further related to the traceability practice in the sector. Nimbalker et al. (2015) reported 59 fashion brands for the traceability information pertaining to their suppliers. The results stated by Nimbalker et al. (2015) in their report show that around 15% brands did not even identify their first tier suppliers and condition is worse when only less than 10% of the brands were having 100% information about raw material suppliers, while remaining 90% percent know partially or have no information at all.

In the state of such opaque supply chains, it is very challenging to make sustainability claims. According to Zhang and Kraisintu (2011), traceability is considered as an integral component for sustainable supply chain. Further, product recycling is a contemporary practice for sustainability. According to McDonough and Braungart (2010), recycling or giving back to the planet is one of the key necessity prerequisites for a healthier and sustainable future. Products should be designed in a way that they can provide nourishment for something new at the end of their life, i.e., emphasis should be given cradle to cradle instead of cradle to grave (McDonough and Braungart 2010). However, correct information about the product’s components plays a crucial role so that disposed products can be segregated for using appropriate techniques or operations to pursue the cradle to cradle concept. In this context, global recycle standards mandate traceability as a pre-requisite to sort the product before the recycling process so as to prevent the mixing of different materials (Global Recycle Standard 2011).

It is worth mentioning that sustainability is independent of traceability, but in order to make an accountable claim, traceability is inseparable from sustainability and it acts as a foundation for the three previously mentioned elements or pillars of sustainability. The next section substantiates the role of traceability in supporting sustainability.

International organization for standardization (2007) defines traceability as the “ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item by means of documented recorded identification”. Traceability, as the name specifies, is a link that connects various element of information pertaining to a product (Agrawal et al. 2016). The basic notion of traceability can be seen as informationally extending the boundaries of the stakeholders in the supply chain beyond their organizational scope. As the textile sector is a fragmented sector—comprising of various suppliers, manufacturers, and other stakeholders—the sustainability cannot be attained by the isolated efforts of an actor, rather it is a cohesive involvement of all. In this context, traceability integrates the whole sector informationally. It harmoniously and equally supports each pillar, adding to their strength and fundamentals to achieve the objectives of sustainability. The following subsections describe the contribution of traceability towards each pillar of sustainability:

Transparency is the fundamental requirement for sustainability, and in this direction traceability assists in integrating different stakeholders in the supply chain to create transparency along with supporting different aspects of the sustainability. However, implementing traceability is a challenging task owing to the organizational and technological complexities associated with the textile sector and expected outcomes. The organizational complexities can be analyzed from the organizational and supply chain context of the sector. The textile sector is a dispersed network of actors carrying different operations (Shih and Agrafiotis 2015). Despite having dominance in the supply chain, all the upstream suppliers are not managed by the retailer/brand owner. The brand owners monitor only those suppliers which affect them mostly. The rest of the links are either monitored indirectly (such as random audits or certifications) or not monitored at all. Hence, the textile supply chain is not an integrated sector, and the retailer—which acts as supply chain captain—partially controls the supply chain, and there is no single actor which can enforce the strategies for traceability (or transparency) throughout the supply chain. Additionally traceability is a double-edged sword, it brings better control and other benefits which assist transparency in the supply chain, however, the increased transparency is not always beneficial and acceptable to all. For example, the supply chain actors would not like to disclose all his suppliers and related information because  this may benefit the opponents directly or indirectly and affect their strategies. Moreover, there is often an involvement of agents (or middlemen) between the buyers and the suppliers, and the names of suppliers act as a competitive factor for the agents. As agents disclosing the name of suppliers for supply chain transparency can potentially lead the buyers to bypass the agents for future contracts with the suppliers; therefore, it is not considered a favorable option to the agents (Egels-Zandén et al. 2015).

As the consumers hold the brands responsible for the supply chains, the brand owners need to monitor all the suppliers to ensure that traceability information is correct to avoid any public scrutiny, which is undeniably time-consuming and monetarily expensive. Other larger issue concerns the traceability is unavailability of global regulations. Some countries have local regulations for traceability such as EU has regulations which mandate the traceability for the entire chemical used in the textile industry (Alves et al. 2013); however, this kind of regulation is limited to a specific geographic space whereas present textile supply chains are globally spread.

Technological aspect includes the challenges associated with the technical establishment of a supply chain-wide traceability systems. Sustainability is an integrated phenomenon where all the stakeholders in the production, consumption, and disposal phases contribute towards the sustainable practice (Kozlowski et al. 2012), and a traceability system would be required which can integrate all of them. In this context, a common framework and standardized semantics would be needed. Further, the  actors in the supply chain would need to comply with a common information exchanging semantics for a streamline exchange of traceability information. It can be also noted that the retailers are expected to be the top beneficiary of the traceability as the consumer identify the whole supply chain with the brand identity, whereas traceability implementation would require investment from all upstream suppliers. Some of the supply chain actors are small-scale industries for whom the financial investment on traceability might not be a lucrative option especially when the profit margin is small and the return is expected in the long term. Furthermore, the traceability is an informational aspect which is managed by and works on the credibility of the traceability information holder or owner; consequently, there is a large room for the owner to fabricate the sustainability information, who can falsely manufacture the sustainability aspect. Also, the sustainability is not limited to manufacturing or industrial processing, but also defined by the use and disposal, and for this, the traceability information should be delivered to the end-users and disposal handlers, which requires information mapping to each product individually. Barcodes, RFIDs, and other traceability number-based labels are used to uniquely identify the products in the supply chain, and the traceability information is delivered to the end-user with reference to these labels. Although the price of an RFID less than a dollar, it is still very high particularly for low-priced garments, which is a challenge in implementing RFIDs in the supply chain (Nayak et al. 2015). Moreover, as RFID tags integrated in the product for traceability can be used for unsolicited tracking of the end-users, which creates privacy concerns. In fact, the cloth retailer Benetton had to plan the withdrawal of the use of RFIDs in their products because of these probable privacy concerns (Juels 2004; Nayak et al. 2015). Furthermore, the printed labels including QR- and bar-codes are easy to replicate to use with the counterfeit products. To implement a communication in the traceability information from manufacturing until disposal of the product, the economical traceability markers need to be devised which can recall the product information at all stages of the product lifecycle.

Sustainability and transparency are growing concerns in the textile sector, given its impact on environment and society particularly resulting from a fierce competition of the organizations to achieve economic growth. Sustainability is a multifaceted concept combining the economic, social, and ecological aspects a product starting from cradle to grave. In this direction, various sustainability initiatives have been pursued by different textile brands such as introducing sustainability into corporate social responsibility, green/compliance certification, and designing of products according to cradle to cradle concept. Concerning this, traceability is one such initiative which has been regarded as vital component for pursuing the different aspect of sustainability. The present paper, in this direction, provides a comprehensive analysis on how traceability can be used to progress sustainability goals and the potential challenges in real implementation of traceability assisted sustainability. Textile sector is a distributed and heterogeneous sector combining different actors dealing with a wide range of raw materials and distinct processes. Traceability, in such complex supply network, extends the informational boundaries of the stakeholders beyond their organizational scope which helps in informationally integrating the whole supply chain. This integration brings more visibility, transparency, and accountability in the supply chain thus supports the sustainability claims. In fact sustainability is based upon the parameters many of which are information-based and cannot be verified or claimed by the lab-based cross examination of the product; rather they are based on a proper information management for the claim and verification. Particularly to the information-based aspects, traceability acts a fundamental requirement—which retains the links between various components of information such that various sustainability claims can be verified (Schröder 2008); therefore, it provides the ability to trace back the product history and then authenticate the claims. Furthermore, traceability acts as a vital component in post-sale and post-use phases which provides crucial information to reduce the impact of product. Since this paper is a literature review-based conceptual paper which provides a holistic perspective, further research, both empirical and non-empirical aspects must be done in order to substantiate the best traceability practices such as identification of critical component of traceability information and supporting technologies, for pursuing the sustainability goals. Furthermore, from the organizational point of view, future research can be focused on how traceability can be implemented in a supply chain network without jeopardizing or minimally impacting the relation.