What’s New with Textile Exchange’s Preferred Fiber and Materials Matrix? Plenty.
Textile Exchange launched on Monday the newly updated Preferred Fiber and Materials Matrix, an interactive platform designed to bolster what the sustainability multistakeholder group describes as a “holistic” understanding of certified material choices.
Known as the PFMM for short, the newly open-source tool assesses the performance of different sustainability standards across 80 indicators. Of these, six are quantitative and based on life cycle assessment data. The platform also includes qualitative criteria, such as the presence—or absence—of explicit requirements around management systems and monitoring.
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Not only will this allow brands to make better-informed material sourcing decisions, Beth Jensen, Climate+ impact director, said at a recent briefing, but the owners of these systems will also be able to ascertain how they measure up to their peers in terms of their shared “direction of travel.”
The latest version includes refreshed methodologies for impact indicators such as climate, water, chemicals, land, resource use and waste, biodiversity, human rights and animal welfare, as well as something called “initiative integrity,” which measures a given standard system’s robustness and governance.
Both human rights and initiative integrity are new to this iteration of the PFMM, which was adopted by Textile Exchange in 2020 after it was originally conceived by Gap Inc. for its internal designers and product teams. It has undergone “significant” updates since then, the organization said, with revised content underpinned by expert insights, such as ZDHC for chemicals.
The PFMM assesses each impact area on a 100-point scale spanning five levels that describe what the score means in more descriptive terms, from “baseline” to “transformational.” These numbers are meant to be viewed within the impact area itself, meaning that each standard no longer has an overall performance rating.
“We know that some standard system systems are not designed to address all of the impact areas,” said Sam Pettifer, senior manager of Climate+ impact tools. “We want users to focus [on] the impact area’s performance and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each standard system.”
This update marks the first time Textile Exchange has brought the PFMM completely in-house. Where it previously used indicators sourced from other certification assessment tools, such as the World Wildlife Fund’s, the platform is now a wholly independent authority.
Textile Exchange also tinkered with the user interface, which has been updated for improved usability. This includes separating previously paired standards, such as the European Union Organic Regulation and the Global Organic Textile Standard, enabling users to view the performance of each while better understanding how they can be coupled or chained to achieve greater coverage of environmental and social practices across various supply chain tiers.
Pettifer said that it’s important to realize that standard systems alone are not a “definitive solution” to the environmental and social challenges within the supply chain but rather they should be viewed as a single tool that can be employed within a broader framework of due diligence strategies.
“They’re not going to answer all of the challenges that we have,” she said.
Textile Exchange has acknowledged the “critical” quantitative data gaps that exist in the industry at the moment. At the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s annual meeting in Singapore last October, La Rhea Pepper, the organization’s co-founder and then-CEO, said that Textile Exchange is working with the industry to fund high-quality life cycle assessment studies across material categories such as cotton, polyester and leather.
But the nonprofit found that significant impact areas—chief among them climate, biodiversity and human rights—also require further action from standards systems. Plenty of standards, for example, have greenhouse gas reduction goals in place but lack details about monitoring, mitigation and adaptation, Pettifer said. Few biodiversity standards, to name another, focus on the protection and restoration of local habitats. And there’s “much more” that standards can do to adequately protect and respect human rights, she added.
Next up for the PFFM is the expansion of standards systems being assessed within the cotton material category, a significant one for the industry. The first batch of standards will include CottonConnect’s REEL, the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification and the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol.
As 2024 comes into view, Textile Exchange will be zeroing in on making the PFFM applicable to a broader range of initiatives.
“We want to make sure that we can include in the future not only additional standard systems but also branded fibers and other sustainability programs,” Jensen said. “And that will require a bit of an additional methodology to be able to do that. So what we want to do as a next step is take a pass through and do a bit of structuring of the tool.”
Jensen said that the organization sees the PFFM as the “shell, if you will” of its Corporate Fiber & Materials Benchmark, which tracks and compares companies’ progress toward more sustainable materials sourcing.
“The Preferred Fiber Materials Matrix basically provides that same purpose, but for standard systems, branded fibers and other sustainability programs into the future,” she said. “So we have now these two different tools that can provide that sort of benchmarking and shared direction of travel to these two different users, which is really exciting.”
For even more synergy, Textile Exchange is planning to embed the PFMM within the materials benchmarks.
“So that when brands are reporting in on the different volumes of fibers that they’re using, the Preferred Fiber Materials Matrix will feed into part of the scoring related to those fibers that are being reported,” Jensen said.
