C&A Group

Major fashion brands are using greater amounts of polluting synthetic textiles, a survey of 50 global firms— representing $1 trillion in market value and spanning fast fashion, sports, luxury and supermarket own-brands — reveals greater dependence on synthetic fibres that are driving fast fashion, and use of fossil fuel industry tactics, says a report by the Changing Markets Foundation.

Pre-consumer garment waste at some operational and permanently closed brick factories from as many as 19 international brands were found to be fuelling the kilns in Cambodia, exposing people to toxins and causing negative health and environmental impacts.

The Better Cotton Platform, Better Cotton’s just launched own traceability solution for the fashion and textiles sectors from the ginning stage right through to the retailer or brand, will enable suppliers to log transactional information, culminating in visibility of where the raw material has originated from and how much is within a product.

Jargon-laden and flowery sustainability reports by a majority of top brands and retailers would come across as a heap of gobbledygook if their actual performance is taken into account. Well, certainly for the cotton sector. As many as 89% are still non-transparent, unsustainable and show little progress towards improving labour conditions, says the 2023 Cotton Ranking just published by Solidaridad Europe and the Pesticide Action Network UK (PAN UK).

Fashion for Good innovators TIPA Corp and Greenhope are pilot testing their bio-based innovative bags for key performance and quality properties such as transparency, durability and longevity, as alternatives to conventional single-use polybags.

During its annual Impact Day event, this past Thursday 16 June, ZDHC launched the Detox Fashion Radar to benchmark brands that are on their Roadmap to Zero journey to detox fashion based on engagement level and implementation progress. From all of ZDHC’s Contributor Brands, five achieved the highest level of implementation performance in 2021.