With the European Union’s Empowering Consumers Directive—which aims to reduce greenwashing—coming into effect this week, many in the textile industry are thinking twice about the labels they put on their products.

That certainly holds true for Good Earth Cotton, the Australia-based traceable and third-party verified cotton program. The organization is moving away from the terminology of “regenerative agriculture,” which co-founder Danielle Statham said has become a throwaway moniker that doesn’t necessarily reflect real action at the farm level.

“It’s not that I don’t believe that a regenerative practice label should exist,” she said. “It’s more about there are enough acronyms, enough objectives—we need to have outcomes.”

Statham said farm-level data should verify any claim of “regenerative” or “sustainable,” rather than relying on certifications to confirm next-gen agricultural practices are actually occurring.

“We are farmers, and this has been farmer-led, not certification-led,” she said. “We would prefer to substantiate the claims about our cotton, and how we do that is through primary farm data. We need to look at the outcomes rather than the prescription of what people are telling us we should be doing as farmers.”

Along with running Good Earth Cotton, Statham owns Sundown Pastoral Company—a 60-plus-year-old next-gen agricultural operation in Australia—with her husband, David, who also co-founded Good Earth Cotton. The couple also founded and operate FibreTrace, a verification platform that uses a patented luminescent pigment embedded in raw fibers, which is then traced, verified and audited in real time through every step of the textile supply chain.

Source link