TEXTILES.ORG
The International OEKO-TEX® Association, which provides textile product and facility certifications, has introduced MySTeP, a robust, secure database application that houses a textile product manufacturer’s information related to its sustainable operations.
The application complements the STeP by OEKO-TEX certification, a comprehensive certification program for brands, retailers, and manufacturers from all sectors of the textile supply chain who want to validate their sustainable production in a transparent, credible, and clear manner that is consistent country to country.
MySTeP was designed to make it easier to manage complicated supply chain information and to coordinate information with working partners to operate more responsibly. Its database facilitates private, confidential communication between customers and suppliers, ensures that compliance data and other certifications are complete and up-to-date, and helps facility operators more easily manage the components of a comprehensive sustainable production strategy.
Via the supplier dashboard feature, the application provides a simple overview of a company’s textile supply chain and the manufacturers that define it. It can also be customized with benchmarks key to particular aspects of a company’s sustainability strategy as well as features to track the supply chain’s performance against them and other key performance indicators. The new Application Program Interface further aids communication and data sharing via portals and cloud-based vendor management platforms.
OEKO-TEX also offers Standard 100 certification for textile products that are tested to be free from harmful levels of more than 300 potentially dangerous substances, such as residual pesticides, carcinogenic dyestuffs, formaldehyde and heavy metals such as lead.