TrusTrace, a global SaaS company with a market-leading platform for product traceability and supply chain compliance, today announced the launch of its new Deforestation Compliance Solution that helps fashion brands achieve and prove deforestation-free shipments ahead of The Regulation on Deforestation Free Products (EUDR) enforcement that, pending on the acceptance of the proposal to delay, will go into effect either on December 30, 2024 or in 2025. While a delay may be welcome to many, the EUDR requirements remain – meaning brands should continue to prepare for EUDR compliance even in the case of delay.
EUDR aims to prevent deforestation by ensuring products entering the EU do not contribute to deforestation or environmental degradation. To comply, companies must provide full traceability to the plot of land, and ensure their EU-bound products are free from deforestation-related practices. This is poised to have significant impacts across the retail industry, as widely used materials like rubber, wood, and leather fall within its scope.
“For businesses, navigating the complexities of EUDR is daunting; they are under immense pressure to produce granular traceability data, which makes compliance practices challenging since they need to integrate new processes into existing frameworks,” said TrusTrace CEO and Co-Founder Shameek Ghosh. “This is where our new Deforestation Compliance Solution comes into play. It is designed to seamlessly integrate into the existing processes, ensuring that EU-bound products in the brand’s supply chain are compliant with EUDR requirements. The solution is part of the TrusTrace platform, which harmonizes data collection and actions for efficiency and proactive compliance, enabling brands to leverage the collected data to adhere to a broader set of regulations.”
The TrusTrace Deforestation Compliance Solution, which was co-designed with leading enterprise brands to validate that it meets industry needs, enables shipment-level deforestation compliance with ease. The solution employs sophisticated automation to enable users to send hundreds of data collection requests with a single click, perform geospatial deforestation analysis in real-time, and generate pre-formatted due diligence statements for instant submission. The collaboration with OpenAtlas, a leader in geospatial analysis, ensures the highest quality satellite imagery and analysis, combining multi-spectral satellite imagery with state-of-the-art AI.
To aid EUDR compliance TrusTrace encourage users of the platform to obtain an FSC Certification and ensure certification of their supply chain all the way back to the forest level. Material sourced from FSC-certified forests and plantations is largely aligned with EUDR requirements, providing assurance that strict requirements for sustainable forestry have been met in the country of origin.
The new solution specifically offers:
- Shipment-level traceability: Brands can map farms and collect EUDR-required traceability data including GPS coordinates and FSC certificates for each EU-bound shipment efficiently, ensuring full traceability of products.
- Precise risk assessment: Brands can automatically benchmark country-level risks, conduct detailed risk assessments, and instantly verify compliance with geospatial analysis powered by OpenAtlas satellite images – all at shipment level for precise evaluation.
- Real-time risk and compliance monitoring: The solution provides a comprehensive overview of data, insights, and reports for each shipment on an intuitive, easy-to-use risk and compliance dashboard, which enables users to monitor and mitigate risks while maintaining full visibility into compliance status.
- Automated DDS generation: Brands can automatically generate due diligence statements in the required format for each shipment, and easily submit them to the European Commission via API integration.
- Access to supplier support and policy teams: TrusTrace provides support on the customer and supplier level. Policy and regulation experts keep customers up to date on the latest regulatory developments, and dedicated trainers will help suppliers efficiently share their data.
While the EUDR is top-of-mind for businesses around the world, the reality is that they are under pressure to comply with a host of regulations. Within deforestation alone, the UK Environment Act and the US Lacey Act are planned to be amended, and multiple laws require supply chain traceability and due diligence.
According to Ghosh, TrusTrace is the perfect solution for brands to rely on to manage risk and compliance across-the-board. “TrusTrace’s proprietary data collection framework for risk and compliance enables companies to leverage the data collected across regulations. This means that they have the data foundation in place to easily comply with current and future demands, without the need for multiple individual solutions,” he concluded. “With our cutting-edge technology solutions and partner network, we are uniquely positioned to help brands achieve full supply chain visibility and meet global compliance standards.”
