If your company is worried about complying with the impending EU DPP regulations and you are not acquainted with the French AGEC law, then you should be. AGEC’s requirements serve as a warm-up act for Europe’s eventual DDP legistlation.
AGEC stands for Anti-Gaspillage pour une Économie Circulaire, which translates to “anti-waste for a circular economy.” Any company with annual sales of more than ten million euros and 10,000 units must comply with this law. The law is intended to promote a more sustainable economy through greater transparency to consumers about the environmental impact of products sold in France.
At a high level, the law focuses on providing the following information to consumers:
- What went into the product and where did it come from?
- What impact does producing this have on the environment?
- Can the product’s packaging be composted or recycled?
- How can this product be recycled or disposed of?
Different information may be required when DPP becomes law in Europe or when other countries get their act together (hello US). But the result is the same: Those products missing required data will not get past the border.
Since no products means nothing to sell, tracking and consolidating sustainability data has been a priority for PTC’s Retail Sustainability Working Group, a consortium of more than 20 of the world’s most-respected brands. What follows is advice gleaned from this consortium on how you can leverage PLM to create a checklist of requirements and then track/consolidate this data within PLM.
What went into the product and where did it come from?
Think of this requirement as the equivalent of the nutrition label on the side of a box of cereal. Someone buying cereal with nut allergies needs to look closely at the ingredients, while someone who is diabetic may need to know the total sugars. The information on the label has to be sufficient enough to answer the question that each consumer is asking.
The same is true for AGEC, but with the following types of information:
- The product’s use of sustainably-sourced materials.
- A breakdown of the countries of origin of the materials in the product and whether that information can be fully traced throughout the supply chain.
- The presence of dangerous substances or microplastics.
Within PLM, a material’s sustainability attributes typically reside at the material-supplier level. Each material supplier should be able to provide estimated percentage breakdowns of the raw-material content (e.g., Polyester is 90% LYCRA® and 10% PET), the type of content (e.g., 80% Recycled and 20% Bio-Based), and the intended countries of origin for each of their materials. All of this information can be backed up by the material supplier through traceability data or material certificates.
As designers add materials, material suppliers, and yields to their BOMs, all this data can be rolled up to the product-level based on the relative weight of the individual materials as shown in the graphic to the right.
Not only does this allow the designer to verify that they have data for each of the materials (“we’re missing content data for our Hang Tag”), it also provides an estimate of whether the product meets any requirements you have for percent sustainably-sourced materials.
As shown below, this information can be further aggregated so that you have a rough estimate of your overall material content breakdown for a season—updated in real-time as linesheets, forecasts and BOMs change.
The presence of dangerous substances or microplastics is typically a set of attributes applied against a sourcing configuration (as shown below) and validated by the finished goods manufacturer through chemical tests. This usually includes documentation around the manufacturer complying with your Resistricte Substances List (RSL).
What impact does producing this have on the environment?
The European Union introduced its Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology in 2013 to offer standard guidelines for evaluating the environmental impact of the entire life-cycle of a product. Inputs to a PEF are similar to those of other Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools that cover everything from raw materials sourcing to manufacturing processes, from shipping logistics to end-of-life.
It is easy to bring the outputs of a PEF or LCA tool through a simple integration, including normalized emissions, water use, eutrophication, and resource depletion.
How can the product and its packaging be recycled or disposed of?
Many companies use PLM as the primary source of truth for circularity details with the most common attributes added in PLM focusing on product usage (e.g., wearings per wash) and end-of-life details (e.g., takeback programs or downcycling efforts). If these details originate in a PEF or LCA instead, it is easy to bring them in through an integration.
The required information is pretty straightforward for packaging. Here the obligation is to let consumers know whether the packaging is recycleable and provide them with proper sorting procedures through the use of the “Triman Logo.”
Tying it all together in a sustainably-sourced bow
With a framework in place for handling required AGEC information, PLM can now be leveraged for both product- and season-level compliance tracking and analytics. At the season-level, you can see what percent of your products have completed each requirement or take a closer look at areas of your business missing information (e.g., which brands have a higher percent of “Unknown” material content).
The latter type of information can also be used to predict seasonal performance against ESG targets before the season is finalized. Having this data early in line planning would enable your teams to proactively impact your performance against stated ESG goals—such as 100% sustainably-sourced materials.
Once you have identified areas of concern at the season-level, it is easy to drill down to the product-level as shown below.
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