Imagine this...with Andrew Olah

It’s 2047 and radical transparency has become the way of the world for all our consumer products. Buying new means more tax and all the information you’ll ever need is stored in the very fibres of our fabric.

July 2nd, 2021

Written by Andrew Olah | CEO of Olah Inc.

Is there anything more fun to imagine?  

Let me set the scene. It’s 2047 and I’m 93. I probably have too many age spots, a ruddy, prune-wrinkled face and I am hobbling with the help of a walking stick. I obviously bought the stick on eBay and added a brass Kingpins handle to remind me of the good ole days when we had shows before COVID-19. I always wanted a cane, like the ever-so dapper gentleman that my distinguished old grandfather was in an earlier time.   

I need a new pair of jeans because I’m too thin now and the old pair droops. So, I shuffle off to the local denim store which has three sections in the future, one only selling raw jeans (saving water and huge amounts of filth from production and time), a fast fashion section with styles you wear incessantly for some useless short period of time and then throw away, and a huge vintage emporium with wall after wall of old jeans someone else wore. This is my favorite section of the shop and where I prefer to spend my money. It is the busiest part of the store because there is an extra 19.5% tax on newly produced consumer goods. I’m on a fixed income and need a good price. Besides, who wants anything new with all the damage and environmental mayhem that comes in manufacturing? Only the rich, mindless and wasteful buy anything new in 2047. 

I pick out a few pairs of straight legs to try on but first, I need to take out my Linux phone which was made in a fully automated Texas-owned robotic factory in El Paso; everything is open source now that all phone patents have expired and Apple, Google and Samsung gave up phone production. I turn on my trusty FibreTrace® app and my screen shines a light beam on the fabric which contains luminescent pigments in its fibre. All the information I am looking for pops up. First, I learn that the jeans were produced in 2020 in Mexico by a denim mill by the name of “DenimGenius.” There is a link to take me directly to the mill, where I can see the farm that supplied the cotton and the factory where it was made.  I can even read about the women that sewed it, their machines, how long they worked at the factory, how they felt they were treated, where they are now and another link to the pocketing factory and so on.  All the data about the components are there—the zipper, the label producer from Haiti who employs thousands of humans and gives them living wages - not just minimum wages. I can see the sewing thread factory in Greenville, SC, who is Fair Trade, but now bankrupt. This is all good stuff to know, but information I expect from anything I purchase nowadays. 

I then look at what really interests me and see the environmental summary of the jean and all its components.  I can see the cotton was assessed with a wildly negative carbon result of “xxxx” and the denim mill factory used coal from West Virginia to run the plant with negative c02 emissions. It is not great to say the least. There is a link to the coal factory where I learn it was shut in 2027 for countless worker violations, atrocities and emission crimes.  Furthermore, the waste from the indigo that was used to dye the fabric was stuffed in a landfill in Staten Island of all places. I learn the landfill is a methane bomb waiting to implode.    

Y*I*K*E*S*.   

I put the jeans away and wondered why such a product was ever even offered.

One by one, I review every jean’s story until finally I find jeans that contained carbon-positive cotton produced in 2028, where the waste was redeployed for fertilizer and construction (they show the building where the waste was used). Then I see the denim mill ran on solar, wind and bio-fuel – all renewable energy. I try this one on and this happy history pair of jeans fits me perfectly. 

I cheerfully leave the store with a product that had a decent verifiable history. Buying jeans is like hiring an employee or meeting a new friend. We ideally want to meet someone who has a legal, decent past and avoids criminal activity, doesn’t use a pseudonymous name or have charges of harassment hovering about them. The G7 leaders legislated in 2031 that messing up the environment is a criminal act, not unlike throwing water bottles out of a moving car’s windows. Buying old or new bad stuff is now like buying stolen goods. 

The point of this story is not for me to sell you anything but to simply share the joy of imagining shining a light on any consumer product and knowing its history. I would have loved in my career to shine lights on factories knowing their past.

Performing forensic testing on anything is like finding out something is wrong way too late, like eating bad food to find out it was bad from the jump. Certifications are useless if you already feel ill. 

FibreTrace® is a tool that you can quite literally shine a light on and find out what’s inside the fibre, yarn, fabric and garment. Like ‘the future me’, it will tell you the history of any garment. The technology behind FibreTrace® uses the same technology in currency, the dollar, the euro and passports. I levitated when I saw the FibreTrace® technology and I now own a small piece of it simply because I can’t afford to own and finance the whole thing myself! So, the question is, why wouldn’t everyone use this technology if the EU and U.S. government use it for cash and passport verification?

I guess it very simply boils down to the question of whether polluting our environment is a crime or not. If you think polluting the Earth is not a crime, who cares what you do because buying cheaper products is seemingly more preferable over committing environmental or social crimes. Let’s just all continue as we are, buy and toss. But if you think polluting or abusing factory workers is a crime, I think we need to instantly know what’s going on with every consumer product you purchase. And that is the reason I believe in FibreTrace® and any technology that instantly tells you what’s going on. Forensic testing is for corpses, which is what our Earth will be if we keep going the way we are going. 

Have a great day.   

About Andrew Olah

Andrew Olah is the Chief Executive Officer of Olah Inc, a textiles consultancy agency focused on denim, and is a member of FibreTrace®’s Board of Directors. He is also the founder of the Kingpins trade show - the first supply chain exhibition, and founder of the Transformers summit series.

Andrew has been working in textile development and marketing since 1976 in more than 30 countries.

Andrew’s knowledge of textiles, cotton and the supply chain reveals he is a progressive force for environmental and social responsibility and in the denim industry, and the textiles industry more broadly.

“The future I see and have seen since Paul Stenning showed me the product is that FibreTrace® is a tool every single metre of textile in the world should contain. It’s that good and there is nothing to compare it with.”