It ain't fashion, if it ain't sustainable
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TOP STORY
Consumer Returns / Fast Fashion

18 February 2026

 4 minutes

Charging for Returns Won’t Fix Fast Fashion’s Structural Waste and Overproduction Model

Free returns reshaped digital fashion by lowering purchasing risk, but they also embedded hidden environmental costs within everyday shopping routines.

Free returns have been central to the expansion of digital fashion marketplaces over the past decade. Asos has adjusted that formula by imposing charges on frequent returners and introducing transparency around individual return behaviour. The decision highlights tensions between convenience-driven consumption and sustainability commitments within fast fashion systems.

  • Anastasia Vayona
 Analysis
Latest: Updates
Other Top Stories
Beyond Headlines / STICA Report Analysis
The gap between what the apparel industry reports on climate and what its emissions trajectory reveals is a defining tension of the current sustainability era.

Fashion Industry's Climate Reporting Has Outrun Its Actual Emissions Progress

  • Subir Ghosh

17 February 2026
SecondHand / Trade Standards Commentary
Global trade in secondhand clothing has expanded sharply over three decades, exposing weaknesses in customs classification and raising new questions about how reuse and waste are distinguished at the border.

Secondhand Clothing Boom Now Faces a Regulatory Reckoning, Sorting Standards Needed

  • Subir Ghosh

16 February 2026
 
Intertextile Shanghai Apparel Fabrics – Spring Edition
CIRCULARITY / RECYCLING / SECONDS / WASTE
Informal employment and thin profit margins heighten vulnerability to unsafe conditions, wage insecurity and labour exploitation across collection and sorting activities.

Informal Recycling Work Heightens Exposure to Labour and Environmental Harm Across Value Chains, OECD Analysis Finds

Recycling processes in the garment and footwear sector were found to carry heightened labour, environmental and governance risks, driven by widespread informality, low margins and hazardous working conditions. The analysis highlighted forced labour, child labour, unsafe facilities and criminal waste practices as material exposures within collection, sorting and reprocessing systems.

Staff Writer
 
FLASHPOINT: CLIMATE
Climate Impact / Garment Workers
Supplier investments in renewable energy and efficiency upgrades are largely self-financed or debt-funded, while formal brand-backed adaptation frameworks remain rare across assessed companies. Worker exposure to heat stress, flooding and income disruption was repeatedly documented, yet structured financial support from buyers remains minimal.

Climate Adaptation for Garment Workers Remains Critically Underfunded in Global Supply Chains, Report Finds

  • Staff Writer
 Update

13 February 2026

A new Roadmap has urged global fashion brands sourcing from major garment-producing hubs to fund and implement a Just Energy Transition across their supply chains, warning that persistent financing gaps, weak adaptation measures and price-driven purchasing practices are shifting climate risks onto suppliers and workers throughout production networks.

Climate Action / AII Study
The study highlights pooled funding structures to unlock supplier-level decarbonisation at scale across sourcing regions.

Continued Climate Inaction Puts About 70% of Market Value at Risk by 2040, AII Report Finds

  • Staff Writer
 Update

12 February 2026

Continued climate inaction could place around 70% of projected market value at risk by 2040, while delayed regulatory compliance may significantly erode profitability. A new analysis by the Apparel Impact Institute (AII) has modelled the financial exposure associated with carbon pricing, supply-chain disruption and transition risks, outlining how early mitigation strategies alter cost trajectories and long-term enterprise resilience.

 
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FOCUS: COTTON
The rise in imports reflects short-term domestic supply constraints and competitive global prices, particularly for higher staple-length cotton.

‘MSP Isn’t Distorting Prices’: CCI Head on Imports, Yields, and the Road to Cotton Stability

The single largest cotton trading company and a public sector undertaking under the Union Ministry of Textiles, the Cotton Corporation of India (CCI), established in 1970, undertakes price support and commercial purchase operations to safeguard the economic interest of farmers in the cotton growing regions and to ensure its smooth supply to the textile industry. A Q&A with its Chairman-Cum-Managing Director, Lalit Kumar Gupta.

Richa Bansal
From sowing to spinning, every segment of India’s cotton value chain is under stress, affected by rising costs, outdated technology, and fragmented policy oversight across ministries.

Frayed Futures: India’s Cotton Crop Unspooling Fast

  • Richa Bansal
 Report

3 November 2025
 
 
SPOTLIGHT ARTICLES: MOST READ
 
SPOTLIGHT EDITIONS: SELECT 4
Cotton for Good 2024 7 Oct 2024
One Crop, One Fibre, Many Stories
 
 

Highlights: Sea Change

"Quote Unquote"

Swapneshu Baser
Swapneshu Baser
Managing Director
Deven Supercriticals Pvt Ltd
The central engineering challenge was not making an existing dyeing process faster but eliminating the fundamental reasons why both conventional and prior-art CO₂ dyeing processes are slow. In conventional water-based dyeing, time is consumed by diffusion-limited exhaustion, repeated baths, fixation, washing, and multiple auxiliary chemical steps.
MORE: A New Dyeing Architecture Challenges Established Textile Process Orthodoxy

"Quote Unquote"

Sekhar Lahiri
Sekhar Lahiri
Director
Stichting UPV Textiel
The Dutch EPR legislation is relatively new. Hence, we have to involve producers and importers actively to raise awareness. Furthermore, we involve not only them but also collectors, sorters and recyclers to gain a better understanding of what is currently happening in the textile value chain and to get insight about what can be done to further improve things from a circularity perspective.
MORE: Systemic Overhaul Across Design, Disposal and Recycling Key to Advancing Circularity in Textiles
 
FOCUS: LEATHER
The fair's expansion into newly constructed exhibition halls at Chennai Trade Centre failed to address fundamental organisational issues, with similar product categories scattered across disparate locations forcing extended navigation.

IILF 2026 Exposes Gap Between Boardroom Sustainability and Tannery Floor Reality

Chennai's IILF 2026 exposed contradictions shaping India's leather industry: innovative chemical systems alongside organisational failures, Trump tariffs suppressing demand yet prices holding firm, and sustainability frameworks that never reach tannery workers. The 'Leather Carnival' demonstrated both the sector's professionalisation and its struggle to reconcile traditional identity with market realities.

Vasan Suri
Lineapelle 2025 demonstrated that the industry is ready to communicate in a different way. The collaboration between UNIC, Lineapelle, La Conceria, Is It Leather?, and voices like Volkan’s marks the beginning of a more open, consumer-connected era. But collaboration must extend to influencers, educators, and storytellers, people who can speak the language of the next generation of consumers.

The Power of Storytelling, Community and Leather’s Next Chapter

  • Blake Garavaglia
 Commentary

14 October 2025
 
 
ATTENTION: DENIM
 
COMPANY NEWS / PRESS RELEASES
 
Young India Fashion Survey 2025