COLLABORATION & CO-CREATION -
Cotton is planted on 2.4 percent of the world’s crop land and yet it accounts for 24 percent and 11 percent of the global sales of insecticide and pesticides, respectively. Organic cotton represents less than 1 percent of the global total annual crop, but National Geographic, international clothing brand C&A, and activist and filmmaker Alexandra Cousteau believe that needs to change.
MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
In 2025, there is one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish in the oceans, and in 2050 the weight of plastic has overtaken that of fish. While the cause of this future scenario would largely be the work of plastic bottles and other types of packaging, part of the blame falls on our clothing. So denim giant G-Star and marine pollution campaign group the Plastic Soup Foundation (PSP) are joining forces to stop this process in its tracks with a battle against microfiber.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY -
‘Fast fashion’ holds a prominent position in the apparel industry despite the many problems associated with it, from labor conditions to clothing waste. In the three years since the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the revolt against fast fashion has gathered steam.
INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY -
Global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland prides itself on its commitment to innovate and operate in an accountable and responsible manner — in terms of its products, the communities in which it operates, and the outdoors. As part of this commitment, the company today announced the implementation of its rigorous environmental standard — the Timberland Environmental Product Standard (TEPS) — across all of its product categories, beginning with its Spring 2016 collection.
INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY -
SustainU, a West Virginia-based leading producer of apparel using fabrics from 100 percent recycled, domestically manufactured materials, this week announced a partnership with Major League Baseball (MLB) to produce licensed apparel for the 2016 season.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
This Sunday, April 24th, will mark the third anniversary of the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, when workplace health and safety failures cost 1,134 people their lives and injured many others.
INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY -
A minimum of 10 billion apparel and footwear products are expected to be produced with unique digital identities and data profiles in the cloud over the next three years through a partnership between packaging materials leader Avery Dennison and Internet of Things (IoT) company Evrythng. The companies believe this to be the largest number of IoT-connected products in a single deal, to date.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
This year, Fashion Revolution’s annual campaign has expanded into a week-long series of events featuring hundreds of activities, stunts and social experiments across 84 countries worldwide. Throughout Fashion Revolution Week, April 18th to 24th, consumers will demand transparency and raise awareness of exploitation in the fashion supply chain by posting on social media using the hashtag #WhoMadeMyClothes.
MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
As Levi’s VP of Social and Environmental Sustainability, Michael Kobori, said last year in a blog post, along with a long-standing partnership with Goodwill to divert clothing from landfill and take-back programs for apparel for recycling into everything from building insulation to cushioning material, Levi Strauss’ circular economy ambitions include establishing an infrastructure that support
INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY -
When you’re shopping for your next hoodie, this startup is hoping you’ll choose to plant as many as 93 trees: ch8se (choose) is a new experimental fashion brand from Amsterdam that has decided to donate its would-be advertising budget towards planting trees or providing food or water to those in need.
“This is an attempt to democratise consumer activism. We believe that conscious consumerism is our most effective tool for making a change and it's currently extremely under-utilized,” ch8se co-founder David Eros told Sustainable Brands in an e-mail.
NEW METRICS -
Fashion brands’ sustainability performance has lacked independent verification and true transparency. European non-profit MADE-BY is hoping their ‘ground-breaking’ new tool, called MODE Tracker, will change that.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY -
To celebrate the first World Recycle Week April 18th to 24th, fashion retailer H&M is partnering with artist and singer M.I.A. on an ambitious global garment collection campaign. H&M aims to collect 1,000 tonnes of unwanted or worn out clothing items across its over 3,600 worldwide stores. To raise awareness, an exclusive M.I.A. music video will debut on April 11th at hm.com.
PRESS RELEASE -
Hanoi, Vietnam, March 15, 2016—IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, is partnering with global leading apparel and footwear company VF Corporation and consumer products retailer Target Corporation to improve resource efficiency at their supplier factories in Vietnam. Under the first phase of this program, energy and water efficiency assessments will be conducted at about 30 factories over the next 12 months to help them reduce operating costs and improve productivity while contributing to the country’s green growth and climate change targets.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY -
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is transforming both consumers’ shopping carts and companies’ supply chains by allowing intelligent barcodes to talk to a networked system that tracks products from Point A to Point Z.
A technology once limited to tracking cattle, RFID tags are now tracking consumer products worldwide. Many manufacturers use the tags to monitor the location of each product they make from the time it's made until it's pulled off the shelf and tossed in a shopping cart.
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR CHANGE -
Today, Canadian environmental NGO Canopy welcomes six large Chinese viscose producers to the growing roster of fashion and textile leaders committed to eliminating the world’s ancient and endangered forests from their fabrics. While to date 60 brands and designers, representing more than 85 billion USD in annual revenues, have signed on to the CanopyStyle campaign — triggering the need for deep shifts within the viscose supply chain — the real change will come from producers, who must provide the industry with alternatives.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
Today, outdoor apparel company The North Face launches the second installment of its locally and domestically produced clothing line, The Backyard Project. For this new line, The North Face challenged itself to find ways to expand and scale its pilot project with a goal of increasing both domestic production and impact. The Backyard Project again brought together a collective of farmers, artisans and small businesses to achieve increased production, new styles and colors and a lower price point for consumers.
ORGANIZATIONAL GOVERNANCE -
Leading up to her trip to the Parley Ocean School, adidas Group designer Jasmin Bynoe was unsure of what to expect. She was about to take to the seas for a 5-day adventure in the Maldives alongside 17 of her colleagues from adidas; they would be learning about plastic pollution and what they could do to help from Parley for the Oceans educators, and it was sure to be a unique experience.
INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY -
There aren’t many businesses that dedicate a fifth of their team to measuring impact. Luckily at Thread, we recognized early on that if we were going to produce the most responsible fabric in the world with a completely traceable and transparent supply chain, in an industry that is notoriously opaque and dangerous, we would need the data to back it up.
ORGANIZATIONAL GOVERNANCE -
More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, and over 50,000 more arrived by boat in January 2016. While most asylum seekers are trying to escape the war in Syria, tens of thousands are also fleeing Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, Albania, Pakistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Serbia, and Ukraine. Once they arrive in Europe, they face numerous barriers to employment – not the least of which are the influx of people, tough economic times, and employers’ perception of refugees.
MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the US alone generates an estimated 24 billion pounds of post-consumer textile waste (PCTW), which ends up in landfills each year — the equivalent of about 70 pounds of textiles per person.