The need for sustainability in the fashion supply chain is a much-talked issue recently. The desire for both trendy and affordable clothes has been constantly rising amongst consumers, with big fast fashion conglomerates producing as much as 15 new collections per year to satisfy their customers’ needs. In fact, the average number of garments purchased each year is reaching a 60% yearly rise, and so does the need for water and chemicals that produce dangerous gas in the atmosphere during garment production, polluting the earth’s ecosystem.
Still, an encouraging shift in customer behavior is visible. People have started to demand more transparency in the fashion supply chain and solid proof for sustainability. However, addressing the sustainability issue is not an easy task for companies. “The majority of fashion brands have little or no supply chain transparency down to raw material level,” says Carry Somers, founder/global operations director at Fashion Revolution. They do understand, though, that an ethical approach to production is imperative and can only be achieved by supporting relevant research and generating sustainability assessments.
The Sustainable Apparel Coalition is a promising sustainability assessment development, a strong global alliance of retailers, manufactories, scholars and even labor unions. The coalition’s aim is to measure the environmental impact of the fashion and textile industry by introducing the Higg Index, a tool by which companies will impose self-assessment standards on sustainability and supply issue transparency. They are expected to gather information from their own supply chain and load them into the Coalition’s database, where they become available for all members to use and evaluate suppliers. Even though not everyone is using the Index yet, the number of companies providing information is rising and the numbers are promising.
If the first step towards an ethical industry is assessment, the second is scientific research that can be translated into sustainable materials and processes. Fashion for Good, is a global platform offering an accelerator program that supports sustainable projects such as SpinDye, a traceable and non-polluting coloring method for textiles and Pili Bio, that creates organic dyes from microorganisms. Fashion for Good also connects innovators with companies and retailers that are interested to enter the sustainability field and invest in eco-technology.
Not only processes are becoming eco-friendly though. New plant-based fibers are being developed and may also be the industry’s answer to synthetic and thus polluting ones. Tencel, for example, is a fabric made from wood pulp combined with solvent amine oxide, a non toxic, eco-friendly element. It is produced by using recyclable elements only and can be recycled completely through closed-loop manufacturing. In fact, many high-end companies such as Patagonia, Banana Republic, and L.L. Bean have already been using Tencel in their garments and the list is growing.
All the above are great steps towards a sustainable and ethical fashion and textile industry. The road is still long though and requires determination, commitment, and a strong understanding that a sustainable industry is also a profitable one. Companies have only recently started to accept that funding research and adopting sustainability assessments is not only an ethical choice but a strategic investment for the future.