Round Up – Brands, Traceability, Sustainability

Casa da Moeda Brazil to Mint Gold Traceability Platform

Leonardo Abdias, Director of Innovation and Markets at the Brazilian Mint (Casa da Moeda do Brasil – CMB) has announced measures to combat the illegal gold trade in the country, during an event held in May titled ‘Ways of Gold: the importance of traceability to prevent illegality and irregular extraction’.

The event was organised by Correio Braziliense, a media house in Brazil, in support of the Brazilian Mint, and attended by representatives of government, the central bank, parliamentarians and researchers.

The roll-out of the CMB Secure Traceability Platform will begin later this year. It will consist of a dedicated app allowing the federal government to monitor transactions, the origin of gold, and other information. A valid tax seal will be issued for each transaction, both within the country and abroad. Initially developed to supervise transactions of other products, such as beverages and cigarettes, CMB has been looking to expand this programme to the gold trade since 2021.

The new seal used by the CMB consists of a QR code, which will be generated with each transaction and securely printed directly onto the gold bar or ingot. The code contains data on the party responsible for creating the bar, its date of creation and serial number, country and state of origin, weight, and mining titles and previous traceability data collected along the supply chain.

Only agents authorised to produce ingots or gold bars will have access to these codes, which are generated and stored within the CMB blockchain.

According to Leonardo Abdias, the new system’s main advantages are the possibility of registration and control of all those involved in the purchase and sale of gold, as well as the verification of online documentation generated before the transaction. In addition, the technology allows the monitoring of all transactions on the blockchain.

De Beers Shines Light on Tracr Blockchain Platform

In its 2022 Sustainability Report ‘Building Forever’, diamond company De Beers unveiled progress on its ambitious blockchain traceability programme – Tracr. Initially launched in 2018, Tracr provides for the traceability of De Beers’ diamonds from mine to shelf.

According to the report, an average of 100,000 diamonds are being loaded onto the system every five weeks, which equates to more than 50% of production in terms of value.

Each diamond is given a unique ID when mined, and each transaction in the supply chain is recorded immutably on the blockchain, providing a chain of custody for the product to the retailer and guaranteeing its provenance and authenticity.

Diamond traceability is an important measure used to tackle the illicit trade in conflict, or ‘blood’, diamonds, mined in war zones and used to fund oppressive activities in countries like Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau.

De Beers has now opened the platform to the broader industry. Last May, it expanded to scale following Western-imposed sanctions and other restrictions placed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The company now provides sector-wide provenance in the fight to distinguish ethically sourced stones from the Russian productions still flowing into the global market, despite sanctions.

EU Parliament and EU Council Agree on Sustainable Fisheries

After five years of negotiations, the European Union (EU) Council and European Parliament have finally agreed to revise the fisheries control system. Confirmed on 31 May 2023, the revised rules pave the way to modernise and digitise how entities control the fishing activities of EU vessels and those fishing in EU waters.

The new rules will prevent overfishing, create a more effective and harmonised fisheries control system, and ensure a level playing field between different sea basins and fleets. The rules include:

• Installing vessel monitoring systems on board most vessels.

• Electronically recording catches using electronic monitoring tools on board bigger vessels to improve compliance with landing obligations.

• Improving the tracing of fresh fishery and aquaculture products.

EU countries must install tracking systems on all EU fishing vessels, including those smaller than 12 metres. Small-scale vessels can, however, be exempted from the tracking obligation, under limited circumstances, until 2030.

As the world’s leading seafood product market, the EU, which imports over 60% of its seafood, requires full supply chain traceability of the seafood products sold in its market. According to surveys, today, one out of six fish on consumers’ plates is caught illegally, often supporting criminal networks whose illegal fishing usually involves other crimes. All political leaders, fishing industry professionals, and environmental groups have broadly welcomed the new agreement.

Haelixa Brand Partnership for DNA Authentication

Switzerland-based DNA-marking provider Haelixa has partnered with social enterprise CottonConnect to deliver phygital cotton traceability throughout the supply chain. The partnership, launched with yarn from a Cotton Connect pilot project in Rajasthan and Punjab, India, claims to deliver comprehensive cotton traceability for the first time.

During the project, the DNA marker is applied at the ginning stage, when the cotton fibre is separated from the seed, which involves the lint cotton being sprayed with the marker. Once the marker adheres to the fibre, all the material manufactured from that cotton can be tested at any point in the supply chain, proving the same DNA-marked fibre was used to manufacture specific garments.

The cotton can then be digitally traced through CottonConnect’s software tool, TraceBale, which, based on its ‘bottom-up’ data gathering approach, provides visibility to the cotton journey from the farm to the finished product.

In a parallel development for another industry, Haelixa, together with Argor-Heraeus Latin America, the leading international gold refiners and bar manufacturers, and Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile (Codelco), work together to trace metals.

Haelixa has created a unique DNA marker for Codelco to apply onsite to 99.99% of its gold bars. Once at the refinery, the provenance of the bars is verified through detection of the marker. The detection method is based on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and produces a reliable forensic result. The covert marker does not alter the product’s appearance or properties and is applied as a fine spray that evaporates quickly, leaving the marker attached to the surface of the raw gold, where it stays detectable for years.

Renewcell Collaborates With TextileGenesis for Pulp-to-Retail Transparency

Swedish textile recycling innovator Renewcell has announced a planned agreement with TextileGenesis™ to implement full traceability for Renewcell’s biodegradable raw material, Circulose, across the entire textile supply chain.

The TextileGenesis technology allows Renewcell to share real-time digital traceability with all Circulose customers and supply chain partners, using digital tokens that guarantee a secure chain of custody from scrap to retail. Its ‘fibre-forwards’ traceability captures real-time shipments, and its Fibercoins digital tokens eliminate ‘double counting’ of sustainable materials by verifying the point of origin.

According to Patrik Lundstrom, Renewcell CEO, TextileGenesis provides the company with a fully transparent supply chain that will help bring it closer to achieving its goal of circularity in the fashion industry. With a new factory in Sundsvall, Sweden, it may be able to recycle more than the hoped-for 1.4 billion t-shirts per year and attest to the authenticity of all the reprocessed textiles.

QuVa Pharma Adds GS1 2D Barcodes and RFID to Labelling

Texas-based QuVa Pharma has announced that it is expanding its RFID-embedded, pre-tagged product label platform to include RFID tags that adhere to GS1 standards. QuVa’s adoption of GS1 standards will ensure its products are compatible with medication management platforms and other RFID-supporting technologies that read GS1 RFID labels.

QuVa’s broad portfolio of sterile, ready-to-administer syringes will be the first products to include the pre-tagged RFID GS1 format.

‘Insights from our customers and reports like that of ASHP (an association of pharmacy professionals in the United States), that assessed RFID utilisation in health systems show a growing desire for pre-tagged products with open RFID standards to support increased adoption of medication management systems,’ said Stuart Hinchen, QuVa Pharma Co-founder and CEO.