Café Europe — 11.05.2022

Winterthur/Kemptthal - Cotton merchant Reinhart with headquarters in Winterthur will be the first to offer organic cotton from Africa for which the origin is seamlessly traceable. For this, the international company is using Haelixa’s solution for invisible DNA markers.

Spinning mills can now buy marked organic cotton from the Mwanza Region in Tanzania from Reinhart. Haelixa from Kemptthal in the canton of Zurich has the technology to make this possible, which involves applying unique DNA markers for the full traceability of consumer goods, primarily organic and recycled textiles. The markers are applied to the product material and stay linked to it permanently, which creates a traceable physical fingerprint from producer to retail.

According to the press release, it was important for Reinhart that the Haelixa marker is not only harmless for humans and the environment, but also GMO-free, OekoTex Standard 100 compliant and most importantly GOTS certified. GOTS is the worldwide leading textile processing standard for organic fibers, including ecological and social criteria. The traceability package from Haelixa, founded in 2016 as a spin-off from the Functional Material Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, includes a certain number of tests in Haelixa labs.

“Again and again we hear from our supply chain partners and especially from retailers that it is becoming more and more important to know exactly where the cotton comes from.” Furthermore, they want to be sure that they are guaranteed to get the cotton for which they are paying a premium. “With the Haelixa marker we would like to offer our customers an additional security.”

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