It ain't fashion, if it ain't sustainable

C&A Group

PRESS RELEASE / Announcement

6 December 2024

2 minutes

The partnership between Haelixa and C&A began in 2022 with a pilot project, and since then, they have continuously worked together to trace raw materials.

Swiss Technology Leader Haelixa Enhances Organic Cotton Traceability with C&A Partnership

Zürich, Switzwerland: Haelixa has partnered with C&A, one of Europe's leading fashion retailers, to advance the traceability of its organic cotton. The partnership stems from C&A's commitment to working with others in the apparel industry to pilot and scale innovation. C&A's targets include supporting the growth of organic cotton without synthetic...

Synthetic Fashion / 2024 Status

17 September 2024

5 minutes

These companies continue to bet big on plastic fibres, showing little intention to change and resorting to tactics borrowed from the fossil fuel industry to distract and delay real progress.

Top Brands Using Synthetic Fibres More than Earlier; EU Initiatives on Reducing Fashion's Footprint Are Backfiring

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.

Staff Writer

Textile Waste / Cambodia Hazards

21 November 2023

3 minutes

Workers have previously reported impacts including cough, cold, flu, nosebleed and lung inflammation. Nearby communities have also reported that the practice damages their crops and farmland.

Waste from Global Fashion Brands Contributing to Rights Abuses and Environmental Hazards in Cambodia: Investigation

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.

Staff Writer

Traceability / Better Cotton

3 November 2023

2 minutes

Better Cotton wants to scale up the availability and sourcing granularity of traceable Better Cotton to serve as the foundation for an Impact Marketplace that would compensate farmers for field-level progress, and enable country-level Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) to calculate the environmental impact of Better Cotton in relation to conventional cotton.

Better Cotton Launches Own Traceability Solution for Fashion and Textiles Sectors

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.

Staff Writer

Cotton Crisis / 2023 Rankings

13 June 2023

4 minutes

This is not the first time that Solidaridad and PAN UK have released cotton rankings. Brands and retailers, by virtue of these Rankings, knew where they stood as far as cotton was concerned, and so did the world. They had all the time to make course corrections. What is astounding, therefore, is that in spite of all the resources at their disposal—financial, material and logistical—and all that chest-thumping and deafening rhetoric, brands still cut a sorry figure.

Almost 90% of Top Retailers and Brands Still Unsustainable, Not Transparent on Cotton

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).

Subir Ghosh

Report

Going Circular / Polybags

13 December 2022

3 minutes

An estimated 180 billion polybags are produced every year to store, transport and protect apparel and footwear. Their production, use and end-of-use have a significant impact: conventional virgin polybags have a high carbon footprint and low recycling rates across the globe.

Fashion for Good Launches Project to Test Alternatives to Single-Use Polybags with C&A and Levi Strauss

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.

Staff Writer

Roadmap to Zero / 2021 Rankings

20 June 2022

2 minutes

ZDHC wants to be transparent in how fashion brands’ are making programme implementation progress needed for a sustainable future for fashion.

And the winners—you guessed it—are H&M, etc, etc, etc.

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.