Traceability and compliance solutions provider TrusTrace is teaming up with SaaS platform Peftrust, a product-level environmental footprinting solution for textiles and footwear, to strengthen the validity of product environmental footprint (PEF) claims for fashion brands.

The new collaboration aims to address a growing need to track and trace a product’s lifecycle to assess its overall environmental impact. The integration will be the first end-to-end solution combining environmental traceability and impact, combining TrusTrace’s authenticated environmental traceability data with Peftrust’s LCA environmental scores to offer a complete assessment of a product’s lifecycle footprint.

TrusTrace director of business development Bruno Mattia, who was recently appointed to spearhead business in the region, said in a statement: “In France and Europe, the PEF score has become an integral standard for fashion brands to validate their sustainability claims, improve the impact of their products to enable eco-design and remain in compliance with a growing number of regulations.

“By partnering with Peftrust, a best-in-class product life cycle assessment (LCA) solution, we have integrated our solutions to send specific environmental data to Peftrust which, in turn, is available directly within the TrusTrace platform. As a result, we are now the world's first end-to-end solution combining environmental traceability and impact, providing much more than the interchange of data to offer these critical measurements to the largest fashion brands around the world.”

Credits: TrusTrace /Peftrust

The partnership it adds enhances the specificity of PEF scores by leveraging primary data available through TrusTrace’s platform, as opposed to standard industry-averaged data, which it states tends to be less accurate. As a result, the score takes more brand-specific parameters into account. While a brand only needs to enter a few data points to generate an initial PEF score, utilising TrusTrace data automatically provides more than 20 specific parameters from the supply chain network, making the score “more robust”.

Laurent Bocahut, co-founder and chief executive of Peftrust, added: “Stronger data protects brands from the risk of making false or misleading sustainability claims. Our partnership with TrusTrace is enabling TrusTrace’s customers to more comprehensively evaluate their products and better assess the impact of each at scale. We’re thrilled to collaborate with TrusTrace to help brands glean more and better insights about product life cycles.”

The PEF methodology was developed by the European Commission to account for a product's entire life cycle. The score covers 16 impacts beyond a product’s carbon footprint and is based on Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), the method for measuring environmental impact. This method tracks manufactured materials from the beginning to the end of its “life” to determine its overall environmental impact.