Rethinking Textiles: Tracing Impact in the Industry

The client my team and I are working for in the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) Practicum course is an internationally well-recognised independent organisation. This organization has been a leader in sustainability reporting and accountability. They aim to use their frameworks and tools to train and empower companies of all sizes to build sustainable, long-term value that benefits people and the planet. The standards and frameworks developed by them have helped in consistent and comparable reporting, which companies disclose publicly. The organisation has created comprehensive sector-wise frameworks, and the project I am working on focuses on the textile and apparel sector. This sector is one of the most significant contributors to environmental and social challenges. It is extremely resource-intensive and generates enormous amounts of waste. In recent years, fast fashion has exacerbated the industry’s environmental impact and contributed to increased overconsumption. Fast fashion’s production cycles have accelerated waste generation, which ends up in landfills, and microplastics from the textiles contaminate the area surrounding them. 

Beyond environmental concerns, the textile industry also deals with social issues throughout its supply chain. The workers in this industry, many of whom are women and children from developing or underdeveloped countries, get paid low wages and are made to work in unsafe and unsanitary conditions for long hours. These challenges reveal how environmental and social issues are fundamentally linked with the marginalised population, severely affected by labour exploitation and depletion of natural resources that they depend on. The need for sustainability reporting and adherence is urgent and non-negotiable as well. Consumers, as well as investors in recent years have increasingly demanded transparency and accountability in the value chain of fashion companies. 

Coming back to the project, the intention is to address a critical gap in sustainability reporting and accountability. Larger retailers face pressures to report transparently about their impact. These retailers usually outsource their raw materials from smaller, less regulated Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) or unlisted companies. These companies are far from the public eye, and they operate freely with very little scrutiny despite their substantial collective impact on environmental degradation, labour conditions, and social equity. This creates a false and incomplete picture of the reality of the industry’s true impact, especially from major manufacturing regions like Bangladesh, India and Vietnam. 

The primary objective of the project is to understand the sustainability reporting practices in the garment industry’s value chain in Southeast Asia and identify what barriers prevent small suppliers in the region from adhering to sustainability reporting frameworks and standards. My team needs to choose one major retailer ‘alpha’ and then choose one small and medium enterprise, as well as one unlisted company, from alpha’s value chain and research their reporting behavior. We need to identify practical incentives that can encourage broader adoption of sustainability standards. These insights will directly help our client in developing and implementing their upcoming textile and apparel standard. This will help ensure that it addresses real-world challenges faced by diverse organizations with such complex value chains. Ultimately, this work seeks to strengthen accountability mechanisms within the industry, which enables stakeholders to better understand and address labor-related issues that occur most frequently in these regions. 

My role includes conducting a comprehensive study of alpha, mapping their supply chain, and gathering data on their practices and perspectives. Right now, my team and I are in the process of narrowing down on which company we will choose as alpha and the other two additional companies within their supply chain. We believe relying on both qualitative and quantitative data is equally important, and getting this information from reliable sources is necessary. One observation I personally made is that it is not true that larger retailers have more publicly available information on sustainability as well as their sources of raw materials. I expected that larger companies would be easier to map but this is not the case. We are going through various databases and websites to gather all information and compile it to make the most informed decision as to which company we want to choose as alpha. 

As of now, one of my biggest concerns is that a lot of the research we are going to do depends on interviews and there is a good chance that they either refuse to give us information or are not completely transparent in their answers. I am unsure of how detailed and reliable information we will be able to get from primary sources. Another concern I have is that this project is slightly open-ended, and we might not be able to give valuable suggestions or find an opportunity for our client to tap into within the time frame we have. However, the project is an important step towards improving the entire sector and our research. Ultimately, this project is driven by the aim that transparency should not be a privilege. Challenges will persist, but this is a small step towards building a practice that empowers all organizations, regardless of their size to account for their impact.