How Strategic Supplier Collaboration Can Reduce Textile Waste

Consumers are posing an ultimatum to fashion and apparel brands: Start taking sustainability seriously or they’ll shop elsewhere. A new study of UK consumers found that 81 percent intend to boycott apparel brands that don’t prioritize sustainability within the next two years. These consumers are part of a clear global trend: Growing swaths of consumers now say that sustainability is more important to them than brand name and that they’re willing to spend more for sustainable products.

Consumers have good reason to be concerned. The fashion industry generates an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste each year while creating nearly 20 percent of the world’s water pollution. Sixty percent of apparel products today aren’t recyclable, so most of them are dumped in landfills or burned. And it gets worse: Since so much clothing is made from polyester and other oil-based materials, fashion now accounts for up to 10 percent of all global carbon dioxide output.

Fashion brands and retailers haven’t been quick enough to respond to these seismic shifts in consumer values. They need to begin preparing for not only more eco-conscious consumers, but also better-educated ones. Within the next five years, for instance, we’re likely to see widespread implementation of fashion sustainability QR codes. Consumers will be able to simply scan a code on a tag and get a full account of not only the materials used and the country of origin, but also a product’s water usage and its carbon footprint. Companies that either hide or can’t provide that information will increasingly be left behind for ones that can.

This information was once considered a competitive advantage, but new supply chain due diligence laws are increasingly making it a prerequisite. To achieve the full transparency and traceability these laws require, businesses must map their supply chains. Supply chain mapping grants companies a fuller understanding of their environmental footprint, including where their yarns and fabrics come from, how much carbon they’re emitting, and whether they’re making progress toward reducing energy and water consumption. That information is invaluable, not only for helping companies make the most responsible purchasing and sourcing decisions, but also for communicating their efforts to consumers and governments demanding fuller accounts of their business practices.

Establishing Shared Priorities

As brands and retailers scramble to implement long-overdue sustainability strategies, however, too many are neglecting some of the most important stakeholders in the product development process: the suppliers that manufacture their apparel.

When sourcing offices are working with suppliers in countries like China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, they need to consider these vendors’ business models. For decades these factories have operated with one unwavering objective: to make products as cheaply as possible in order to remain competitive.

These suppliers don’t follow the same headlines about social and environmental responsibility and consumer trends as their buyers do. They’ve been hardwired to compete on price alone. That’s why fashion retailers need to communicate not only their cost and sustainability objectives to their suppliers, but also their rationale for wanting to source responsibly and prioritize reducing waste while staying price competitive.

Brands and retailers need to commit to increasing business with responsible suppliers, but they also need to commit to setting clear goals for their suppliers and helping them meet them. This process takes time: It’s unrealistic to expect a supplier to upend decades-old business models overnight. Companies should share two- and three-year vision plans with their suppliers, and then plan check-ins every six months to see if they're meeting milestones and making the desired improvements.

That’s a big undertaking, especially for apparel and footwear businesses that depend on hundreds or even thousands of suppliers. But as is often the case with matters of the supply chain, technology can make it a lot easier. Supplier relationship management (SRM) software can provide procurement and compliance teams the necessary communication and collaboration tools they need to manage all suppliers at once rather than individually.

SRM software creates a window into an enterprise’s entire supplier base, from vendors to factories to raw material providers. In addition to creating easily accessible chain of custody documentation for all materials used in products, it also saves retailers and brands time by automating the onboarding process for vendors and factories and ensuring that all new suppliers have read and consented to the company’s terms so from the very earliest stages of working with a supplier, they understand your ESG standards and expectations. The collaboration this technology fosters can also help suppliers and their vendors jointly identify opportunities to use more sustainable fabrics and reduce waste created during production.

Advanced SRM systems can even integrate with sustainability databases from business associations and non-profits like amfori and Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP), which monitor and certify the social sustainability of factories and suppliers, as well as Higg, which collects environmental data and allows retailers to measure and manage carbon emissions, water usage and waste. By making critical certification details from these partners available in real time, these integrations eliminate the need for supply chain managers and compliance teams to log into multiple systems, speeding up a critical step in the sourcing process.

Digitalization with a multi-enterprise platform not only helps brands and retailers collect and manage the data they need to reduce their environmental footprint, but it enables them to back up their sustainability claims, which has become essential after so many years of rampant greenwashing. Consumers have made it clear they care about sustainability more than ever. Digitalization lets brands and retailers prove that they do, too.

Rejean Provost is the team lead, ESG Strategy for TradeBeyond, a company that connects retail supply chain operations from product development to delivery.