Sports brand Adidas has revealed itself as an early adopter of Swedish software company TrusTrace’s new product traceability technology.
Adidas has helped shape the Certified Material Compliance software, integrating it with its enterprise systems for product lifecycle management, purchase ordering and supplier management.
Using the new tool, Adidas said it has documented more than one million transactions covering 10,000 materials and styles across 8,000 facilities, all within the first four months of operating the platform. Being able to track materials in this way has helped Adidas create more transparency around its sustainability goals, the brand said.
Among its greener retailing ambitions, Adidas is looking to switch to 100% recycled polyester by 2024, as well as ensuring nine in ten of its articles feature a sustainable technology, material, design or manufacturing method by 2025.
Katja Schreiber, senior vice president sustainability at Adidas, said: “As part of its commitment to sustainability, Adidas has worked with TrusTrace to gain more visibility into our complete supply chain down to the materials level.
“The information gleaned from TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance will help us to create even more transparency of our sustainability efforts.”
According to TrusTrace, the new traceability technology gives adopters granular visibility into product sustainability metrics, ensuring compliance with standards and regulations, and enabling streamlined decision-making and tighter integration with suppliers worldwide.
It addresses emerging industry methodologies and pending government regulations that will require brands to base sustainability claims on verifiable and precise data.
Shameek Ghosh, CEO of TrusTrace, commented: “In the midst of global greenwashing and challenges with unsubstantiated claims, brands and regulators are moving quickly to instil confidence among consumers that products are, indeed, as sustainable as they claim to be.”
He added that Certified Material Compliance suits brands that wish to establish “near real-time traceability at the lot level by mapping the movement of raw materials to finished goods, and to automatically calculate the sustainability metrics of those goods”.
“By linking all purchase orders to production steps, certificates, supplier declarations and quality reports on the TrusTrace platform, Certified Material Compliance helps brands manage risk and compliance and allows them to prove sustainability claims with confidence,” Ghosh continued.
The new traceability technology can also help identify material waste in the supply chain by calculating discrepancies between inputs and outputs, according to TrusTrace.
[Image credit: Adidas]
