A groundbreaking new Fashion Impact Toolkit reveals nearly 3,000 sustainability impacts across the textile industry's sprawling global value chain.
This unprecedented inventory highlights the urgent and complex challenges facing the fashion sector—from raw material sourcing to garment disposal.
The tool aims to equip companies with a common language to understand and address their environmental and social footprint, fostering a more agile and sustainable future.
- Developed by Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) and Deloitte, the toolkit aims to accelerate sustainability efforts by offering a structured inventory of both positive and negative impacts, which can be filtered by material and geography, and serves as a starting point for strategic sustainability planning.
THE HIGHLIGHTS: The Fashion Impact Toolkit has identified approximately 3,000 distinct sustainability impacts across the textile value chain, providing a comprehensive overview of the industry's environmental and social challenges.
- This new resource serves as a crucial guide for companies to understand and assess their sustainability footprint, helping to establish a common language and framework for collaborative action within the complex and fragmented textile sector.
- Complexity of the Value Chain: The global textile value chain is highly fragmented, making it extremely difficult for companies to trace operations and identify all related sustainability impacts, especially beyond direct suppliers. There is also a significant gap in visibility regarding circular activities like reuse, resale, and recycling.
SIX STAGES OF IMPACT: The toolkit categorises impacts across six key stages of the value chain:
- Production of Materials: This stage sees significant impacts like biodiversity loss due to water pollution, chemical use, and monoculture, particularly with natural fibres such as cotton, wool, and cashmere. Synthetic fibre production, on the other hand, is energy-intensive and can contribute to air, water, and soil pollution, including microplastic release. Social concerns at this stage include forced labour, child labour, and low wages, with animal welfare also being a concern for materials like wool.
- Garment Manufacturing: This stage is marked by heavy water consumption and the discharge of untreated wastewater from wet processes, intensifying water stress and contaminating local waterways. Dry processes are energy-intensive, contributing to air pollution from fine particulate matter and chemical emissions. Workers in these facilities face exposure to hazardous chemicals, high noise levels, and excessive heat, leading to various health issues.
- Product Distribution and Use: While not explicitly detailed as distinct "impacts" in the provided snippets for this section, the toolkit covers this stage, implying associated environmental and social considerations related to logistics, retail operations, and consumer behaviour.
- End-of-Life Management: This stage encompasses waste collection, sorting, incineration, and landfilling.
- Material Recycling: Recycling activities have a positive impact on responsible business conduct through improved transparency and compliance with labour and environmental standards. They also offer new, higher-paying technical roles, though communities near facilities may face water pollution from untreated wastewater.
- High-Value Recovery Activities: These circular activities, including eco-design, reuse, repair, resale, and remanufacturing, extend garment life and reduce the need for new materials, diverting waste from landfills. However, potential negative impacts include the "rebound effect" (overconsumption due to discounted items) and environmental costs from reverse logistics.
- Transversal Impacts: The toolkit also highlights impacts that occur across all activities and affect various actors, specifically concerning own workers, workers in the value chain (e.g., limited collective bargaining, low wages), and business conduct (e.g., gaps in anti-corruption measures, inadequate whistleblower protections).
MOVING TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: The report emphasises that addressing these pervasive impacts is crucial for reducing environmental and social harm and driving long-term industry-wide transformation.
- Key actions for mitigation include implementing eco-design strategies, adopting regenerative agriculture practices for natural fibres, improving water and wastewater management, and promoting responsible purchasing and fair labour practices.
- The toolkit is designed to help companies build company-specific impact inventories, enabling strategic sustainability planning and fostering collaboration across the value chain to address root causes and unlock shared value.
WHAT THEY SAID:
We hope that the Fashion Impact Toolkit will be a valuable resource for the textile industry as it navigates increasing regulatory and stakeholder pressure. By identifying and acting upon the most critical sustainability implications across the value chain, companies can foster greater resilience, trust, and long-term transformation. We are proud to collaborate with Deloitte to support this much-needed shift.
— Federica Marchionni
Chief Executive Officer
Global Fashion Agenda
An early outcome of Deloitte’s collaboration with the Global Fashion Agenda, the Fashion Impact Toolkit is designed to help textile company leaders better understand their footprint across the value chain and help inform how they adapt their strategies to be more resilient. These adapted strategies can help organizations identify opportunities to enhance performance, helping drive industry-wide progress.
— Cecilia Dall Acqua
Strategy Sustainability leader
Deloitte Spain
