Suppliers Push for a 'Data Bill of Rights' as Traceability Costs Mount

A sustainability manager at Elevate Textiles has called for a "data bill of rights" to govern how brands extract information from suppliers — often without paying for it. Calvin Huelsman made the case at Textile Exchange's annual conference in Vancouver earlier this month, arguing that a foundational framework would make data handling across the supply chain fairer, more secure and more streamlined.

For Huelsman, the math is simple: every hour spent re-entering the same data point is an hour lost to carbon and water targets. "There isn't any interconnectedness between [traceability platforms]," he said from the floor. "What we enter into X traceability platform is not able to be input into Y, and that really presents a problem."

Who actually profits from supply chain data?

Digital tracking has long been pitched as a win for everyone: regulatory compliance, fraud prevention, consumer confidence, better performance. For suppliers and growers, though, it's often a one-way street of data extraction — absorbing administrative burdens, certification costs and repetitive entry into disconnected platforms largely on their own.

"What's really important is for users across the system whose data is being used, whose time and labor are being invested, that they also have value in that process," said Ashley Gill, chief standards officer at Textile Exchange. "That they're not just going through a compliance exercise."

Textile Exchange has run its Trackit platform since 2021, consolidating Tier 4 data across sustainable textile standards. Paired with the upcoming unified Materials Matter Standard, Gill said, it gives a systemwide view — showing where certified volume comes from and where it stops before reaching the final product.

What happens when the farm is also your home?

Cotton Australia learned the human dimension firsthand last year, when it ran farmer workshops and spoke with 320 growers — roughly a quarter of its membership. Traceability, said Brooke Summers, head of the Cotton to Market program, "wasn't really in their language."

"Growers were asking more questions than they had answers for, like 'What do you mean by traceability? Does that mean a brand is going to know where I live and where my kids live?'" she said. The economics don't help: growers offering traceable, certified cotton get paid exactly the same as for non-certified cotton.

Data can also mislead. One grower who sprayed crops zero times one season and once the next looked, on paper, like a massive increase in pesticide use. Summers' fixes: bake the value proposition into the initial ask, and decouple sustainability data from physical bales so farmers can sell it directly to brands rather than let intermediaries "clip the ticket." She warned growers may walk away from programs if the admin keeps growing without a clear payoff.

How is Primark handling it?

Primark offers what Huelsman called a "benevolent" model. Since 2022, the retailer has moved from a pilot to onboarding all direct clothing, footwear and textile suppliers, with more than 200 progressing to purchase order-level tracking — logging over half a million POs in the past two years alone.

"While it's still early days, we are really starting to see how multi-dimensional that one view of the supply chain can really be," said Cari Atkinson, head of product and assurance. "It's really helping us to identify risk, whether it's sourcing or operational."

Primark uses CottonConnect's TraceBale system to track cotton from farm through ginning and spinning, adds forensic origin testing from Oritain, and pays premiums for certified materials such as recycled cotton from Recover.

What decision does this force?

Elevate Textiles operates across 17 countries and fields dozens of brand-specific data requests, stretching its team thin. Its workaround is decentralization — local facility teams drive data requests through direct relationships while corporate contextualizes entries — plus a call for something like the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol for supply chain documents.

"Oftentimes, that data sits far outside our ERP systems; it exists in a filing cabinet somewhere with a cotton broker," Huelsman said of last-minute demands under mock detention. "These aren't data requests you can always fulfill within a week." With EU traceability rules bearing down, the decision for brands is whether to pay for supplier data — or watch its quality and availability erode.