Developing a verification tool for environmentally friendly claims made by textile suppliers
Piacenza is a manufacturer of fine woolen fabrics, leader in the top segment of noble fibre fabrics for fashion and luxury markets.
Challenge Summary:
Due to the cost of implementing environmentally friendly practices, there is currently a significant level of false green claims in the marketplace. The most common solution to reduce environmental, sustainability, and circular economy costs is to purchase limited quantities of organic or recycled materials and allocate them to production lots that may be subject to controls. However, regular production is done with less expensive, non-organic or non-recycled material. Since only certain lots are subject to controls, this unfair solution poses limited risks. This practice is well known to customs and security forces who want to fight fraud and counterfeiting. We are looking for a solution to this problem, more specifically a viable and affordable tool capable of assessing the level of reliability of the data provided by the supplier of the textile value for the Digital Product Passport (DPP), in order to combat the false green claims made by unfair competitors and increase citizens’ confidence in environmental claims at different levels.
We are looking for a solution that:
- Collects data that can prevent the adoption of purposeful claims by detecting misalignments and inconsistencies in the statements required for the future DPP.
- Uses cross-checks between the different data sets required for the DPP to detect false green declarations and reject and remove from the market the products that are the subject of false claims.
- Provides internal reliability assessment for data received from suppliers to conduct audits to verify textile supplier declarations and select suppliers with the best and most reliable green and circular performance.
- Leverages existing standardized data models already available in the market.
- Supports estimation of DPP performance of new products based on style definition to
- enable circular economy by design approach and improve 7Ps performance when developing new design ideas.
- Provides an affordable solution that is accessible to SMEs.