New partnership between Google and WWF Sweden to promote sustainability in Fashion.

Google to partner with WWF Sweden with the objective to make the process of sourcing the raw materials and tracking its sustainability easier.

They are building a dashboard that will help the fashion brands to analyze the twenty commonly used raw materials which includes both natural and synthetic products. They will score each of those raw materials and their sourcing locations based on the details like air pollution and water scarcity impacts thus created. They will also evaluate the impacts such as the amount greenhouse gas emission that can be caused.

As per World Bank, fashion industry is responsible for 8% of the total greenhouse gas emitted and they also account for 20% of water wastage. As per Quantis and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, raw-materials are the main source of the total carbon-footprint of the fashion industry although it is least tracked.

The main aim is to combine the machine learning capabilities of Google with deep environment related knowledge of WWF Sweden to help fashion brands to make better decision on sourcing their raw materials.

Google has worked with Stella McCartney on their test pilot. Multiple luxury brands have signed on this platform to participate.

As per Maria McClay, Google head of luxury fashion, when a brand is given access to all details concerning the amount of air pollution and waste they generate in their production process, they can solve their sustainability problems by making better sourcing decisions in the future.

On the other hand, WWF Sweden will strive to provide a life-cycle assessment of the amount of environmental impact each product has created in its lifetime, they will also provide data on the risk involved. WWF will also provide a framework where each of the data can be calculated and processed.

Google will help in providing insights from various complex data sets by providing the users with computing power and satellite imagery through their Google Earth Engine data.

As per McClay, the platform will also strive to mitigate the user’s risk. The data will change from region to region and from season to season to provide an updated global average. The brands will be provided with best solutions to mitigate their risk of creating a negative environmental impact based on the region in which they are operating. The platform is so created such that the data will automatically update to suit the users needs. It is very important for the data to upgrade itself regularly as it is very much essential to reflect changes because the growing cycles may change in a very less time.

This tool will also help the brands to compare their regular raw materials based on their source, rather than comparing each material separately like comparing organic cotton with conventional cotton.

This tool will help the luxury fashion brands to bridge their data gaps by making their supply chain more resilient and transparent.  As per Liesl Truscott, director of European and material strategy at the Textile Exchange, in terms of regionalities and in geographic terms the luxury brands are yet to reach this point where they will have a transparent and resilient supply chain, but this tool will solve this problem and it will equip the brands to undertake a new journey towards sustainability. He mentioned that “It has not been done yet, but it is certainly now on the radar”.