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Fashion still has a lot of technological kinks to work out to bring it up to the 2.0 era. One of these techie problems is finding a way to make products more transparent. With greenwashing smearing sustainable fashion’s reputation, word of mouth and paper ledgers aren’t always enough for brands to show how their products are made and who made them. One answer to this problem is transparency through blockchain.
It’s a decade-old technology that could revolutionize the industry by allowing brands to transparently show how their products are made. Yet, while it’s been around for awhile, it hasn’t been until the last year or so that there’s been a heightened awareness about this technology. As more brands begin to invest in it and the public becomes more aware, it will pay off to know what it is and how it improves the communication between customers and brands.
Keep scrolling to read the cheat sheet explaining what it is and how blockchain can help sustainable brands become more transparent.
What Is Blockchain?
Blockchain is a digital ledger that keeps a record of every transaction that happens to make a product. From growing the raw materials to shipping a product to a store, each transaction along the production stage is logged and saved. In a way, it’s a product’s digital passport showing its origin and where it has been. And, it’s much more detailed than today’s standard clothes tags.
We know so little about the products that we use every day. For example, take your favorite white t-shirt hanging in your closet. Outside of the fabric and ‘Made in…’ tag, little information is given about how the product was made. Is the cotton organic? If so, where is the farm located? Did the fabric mill that wove and dyed the fabric use proper water filtration methods? Were multiple factories involved in the sewing and embroidery (if there is any)? What are the ethical working standards that these factories follow? Blockchain allows sustainable brands to transparently show how, where and by whom their product was made.
Why Is Transparency Important?
After the tragic Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 killed 1,132 Bangladesh garment workers, the fashion industry woke up to the exploitation millions of garment workers suffer daily. In many cases these workers are already earning well below the minimum wage in working environments that are unsafe and unhealthy in terms of building regulations, occupational diseases and managerial abuse. Unfortunately, as a result of poor regulations in garment manufacturing, fire incidences and building collapses like Rana Plaza are frequent. The only way to redress these situations is to amend labor codes and to hold factory workers and local legislation accountable. Also, brands who partner with factories in violation of human rights and labor codes need to be held accountable.
Accountability: Each party involved would be able to see who else has been involved in making the product while being able to update their information. Once the information is inputted, it will stay there always able to be seen by everyone with the code for the particular product. This way, each party involved is held accountable by one another. Brands and partners won’t be able to plead not-guilty when questioned about unsavory aspects of their supply chain like child or slave labor. The information will be stored in one easy-to-reach-and-read place.
Authenticity: Transparency also ensures that a product is made exactly how it’s said it’s made. Did a brand claim that its t-shirts are made from organic cotton? Traceability means that the organic cotton farm that the raw material came from will be logged. Did they claim to work with a female-lead artisan group to make their clothes? That will be logged and transparently shown in blockchain too.
How Does Blockchain Make You A Better Consumer?
As mentioned before, we as consumers know so little about how products are made. And, that can be a problem. We can assume that brands take eco-friendly and ethical initiatives in their manufacturing process, but unless we have that information presented to us in a straightforward way, none of us really know for sure. Blockchain gives us an insight into what resources are used to make clothing and beauty products and even items like toothbrushes along with who understanding who makes them.
Some brands are better than others when it comes to showing the factories that they partner with and releasing sustainability reports to show how they are and aren’t sustainable. Still, the time it takes to log and present this information isn’t always in the budget for smaller brands. Blockchain can offer a way for consumers like you and I see this information without the extra steps of a brand having to log this information on their own budget. Instead, everyone involved in the production process will log in and update their information.
If you’ve ever chosen one brand over another because it’s from a sustainable fashion brand or a product because the fabric was organic cotton versus polyester ( a.ka. plastic-based) blockchain takes that a step further to help you make the most sustainable choice.