A group of retailers, clothing manufacturers, environmental groups and academics, calling themselves the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, intends to announce that it is developing a comprehensive database for every manufacturer, component, and process in apparel production showing its environmental impact and using (in the future) to give every garment a sustainability score:
Later, the coalition hopes to produce a label that would share some version of that score with shoppers, giving them a much more detailed view into the supply of fabrics, zippers, dyes, threads, buttons and grommets that come together to form the clothing they buy, as well as what impact the creation of that clothing has on both people and the planet.
The coalition includes middle-market companies like Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, H&M and Hanes, along with more traditionally environmentally minded manufacturers of rugged outdoor clothing like Patagonia and Timberland. The 30 founding members also include Duke University, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, the labor rights group Verité, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Initially, the coalition wants to help individual companies clean up their supply chains. Company members have all agreed to chip in some money to begin the effort, with the larger companies being asked for additional "seed funding" to support the development of a sustainability indexing tool. Rick Ridgeway, who heads sustainability efforts for Patagonia and is the chairman of the new coalition, estimated that the group would spend $2 million by the end of 2011 on developing the tool.
"People are at such different points on the sustainability journey, and working together can accelerate our ability to make change," said Alex Tomey, a vice president for product development and design at Wal-Mart, which has worked closely with Patagonia to get the coalition off the ground.
"The apparel supply chain is long and quite complicated, and many of our current apparel companies — brand companies — don't really own all the production facilities and factories," said Huantian Cao, an associate professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. "So even for a company that has a label or brand on the product, it might not be easy to study the whole life cycle of that product, because so much of that supply chain is out of their control."
The coalition's tool is meant to be a database of scores assigned to all the players in the life cycle of a garment — cotton growers, synthetic fabric makers, dye suppliers, textile mill owners, as well as packagers, shippers, retailers and consumers — based on a variety of social and environmental measures like water and land use, energy efficiency, waste production, chemical use, greenhouse gases and labor practices.
A clothing company designer could then use the tool to select materials and suppliers, computing an overall sustainability score based on industry standards. If the score exceeds the company's own sustainability goals — or if competitive pressures arising from a consumer label are compelling the company to bring scores down — designers could revise their choices with the tool.
Such a tool is a work in progress. It draws heavily from two earlier efforts — an environmental design tool developed by Nike, and an "Eco Index" begun by the Outdoor Industry Association last year. But these afford only a partial or approximate look at the potential effects of discrete industry segments.
In order to bring broader life-cycle data to the effort, the coalition is also working with the Sustainability Consortium, which is developing sustainability measurement and reporting standards across many product categories
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