Working to Good Effect

What is the expected time frame to replicate this procedure across cotton farms globally? Long haul yes, but what has been the response?
The response to Good Earth Cotton has been highly positive as brands, suppliers and cotton farmers globally, have started looking towards ways to reduce their impact in the supply chain.

The timeframe for farmers to adopt Good Earth Cotton will vary from each individual grower. We pride ourselves not only on best practice and the only way to understand if you are improving is to have date and a baseline of data to benchmark.

Recorded soil testing is critical and understanding the inputs enables improvement. Our goal is to form meaningful partnerships with like-minded farmers globally, working towards climate positive solutions for the future of our industry.

Say a cotton farm in India, or any other corner of the globe wants to adopt this method. What would the steps be on how to go about it and what will be the cost?
Good Earth Cotton works with the growers or their local agronomy teams seeking to implement climate-friendly solutions, with recommendations to identify improvement, suggest the best techniques and practices that will work for their cotton production and livelihood.

Good Earth Cotton is the raw material. The value chain is huge before the product made out of this cotton finds its way to the shelf. What are the steps to ensure that the finished ready-to-buy product is as environmentally sound?
Good Earth Cotton is a physically traced fibre and powered by the traceability technology FibreTrace.

We seek to also partner with like-minded companies who want to make honest change and commitment. Impetus have continued to show a commitment to sustainability throughout the entire business operation and are now taking the next step forward in their sustainability journey by adopting traceable and carbon positive fibres. Good Earth Cotton has made this an easily adoptable sustainability solution.

What have been your learnings on cotton? You have been at it since your teens!
As a fashion student some 30 years ago, my first learning was that there was a huge disparity between the fibre producer (grower) and the fashion brand.

Cotton is a nuanced industry with many complexities, from the way it is traded to the quality required to produce certain yarns or fabrics.

It is a very scientific crop and to reduce your impact and maintain required qualities requires measurement and dedication. To grow a fibre that enhances nature and lends a hand to the environment my children and their offspring will pass on, is the best learning I have taken from this journey.

Tell us about your partnership with FibreTrace. I read somewhere on your website that it has a consumer interface too. How does that work?
All Good Earth Cotton is verified and authenticated by the FibreTrace traceability technology. FibreTrace combines physical and digital traceability with the power of authentication to empower the global textile industry and reduce its impact on the environment.

Our patented process where bioluminescent pigments are blended into our cotton fibres at the ginning facility at minute levels allows the pigment to be instantly readable. Using hand-held, bluetooth-connected readers, FibreTrace allows users to verify, locate and understand the whereabouts of the fibre, yarn, fabric or garment in real-time as it moves throughout the supply chain.

We connect this story to the end consumer by harnessing FibreTrace’s B2C platform which allows the consumers to scan a secured QR code on their garment to experience the entire journey of their cotton product—from farm to shelf.

How has it been going for FibreTrace? What has been the reaction of industry so far? What are the features of your solutions that industry finds most valuable?
We have progressed as an industry from conversations of transparency, to a nice to have, into a necessity. The narrative is becoming very clear that honest transparent information attached to products is becoming a direction of normality for the supply chain and for brands to remain relevant to the conscious customer.

Information is readily available to customers whether it be good, bad or indifferent but when data and metrics can verify the conversation it gives honesty and integrity to the story.

FibreTrace combines physical and digital traceability to provide irrefutable data around a product’s provenance, its environmental claims and the journey it has taken. We believe that the only true way to guarantee traceability and transparency is by connecting the physical traced fibre with the digital (blockchain).

As the only traceability solution currently on market doing this, we are seeing a positive response to FibreTrace as we continue to introduce the product from raw fibre through to brand.

Surely your solutions are not an end in themselves. How are you planning to go beyond what you offer as of now?
The FibreTrace traceability technology is simply a means to the end goal—an enabler for positive and meaningful change.

Traceability alone cannot guarantee that sustainable efforts are being made but is a crucial step in facilitating this change and is even a metric by which brands and retailers are being very publicly judged. Until brands have complete transparency on their supply chain partners to raw source, and can authenticate and verify the products they sell to consumers, change will be nearly impossible to achieve.

We partner with like-minded brands, retailers and suppliers who want to make honest changes and commitments for the purposes of sustainability and circularity.

Mills are mostly out of the big pictures and are usually seen as links in the supply chain of brands and not the other way around. What made you partner with FibreTrace/GEC? How did it all happen?
Acatel, a company of the Impetus Group, is a knitwear and fabric transformation company (dyeing, printing, finishing and garment dyeing), with the aim of providing the best service to customers, in this case to brands.

Knowing that the current concern for the industry involves a search for sustainable and circular products, and because we want to build a better planet for future generations, we established our Mission around the circular economy. In order to fulfill this mission, we prepared a strategic plan in which several actions were identified, one of which was to start using raw materials with a positive carbon footprint in our value chain and demonstrate to our customers the veracity and transparency of our processes.

This action could only be possible with a partnership between Good Earth Cotton and FibreTrace. After several contacts and validating the same strategic alignment, we started this partnership which has resulted in beautiful collections.
 
How does the carbon positive feature work? Could you elaborate? Is the data available for end-consumers, or just to those in your supply chain?
Good Earth Cotton is independently certified as carbon positive, meaning its growth actually reduces carbon emissions in the atmosphere. The farms act as giant carbon sinks and absorb more carbon than they release. This can be proved by an external report by the University of Queensland, Australia.

Good Earth Cotton is also 100% traceable, and we can verify the source of origin in real-time! FibreTrace technology means that fashion brands can build better trust with their environmentally conscious consumers.