Transparency is foundational to how we understand the world.
In this article I present some key ways that textiles, fashion and food can implement transparency measures, and why they’re important.
Transparency is foundational to how we understand people, culture, industry. It is a way of being open; not necessarily to give away all your tricks of the trade, or to stir privacy issues, but simply to be honest about who you are and what you’re doing.
Without transparency we go about in an opaque world where we can’t fully value things because we don’t know the full story. It does pull up the ethics of sharing information, but when it comes to business, there needs to be a held space where trust and value is formed.
This isn’t really how it goes in most sectors though.
When it comes to the fashion and food systems — what I’m here to talk about — transparency is a required tool to transform such exploitative and complex supply chains. It ensures that players are held accountable for their practices and actions, and airs any potential issues or challenges that consumers of those systems have a right to be privy to.
In this article I present some key ways that textiles, fashion and food can implement transparency measures, and why they’re important.
Transparency holds brands accountable.
The Fashion Transparency Index from not-for-profit organisation Fashion Revolution is an annual review of 250 of the world’s largest fashion brands and retailers ranked according to their level of public disclosure on human rights and environmental policies, practices, and impacts in their own operations and in their supply chains.
The index uses an annually-improved methodology to objectively address a brand/retailer’s impacts and outcomes, and especially how much they’re disclosing. It isn’t a simple checkbox, but something that dives deeper to get to the root of the information. And if they don’t disclose, then this is information in itself.
Fashion Revolution then provide guidance for all indicators included in the Index so that brands and retailers can practicably move onwards. The focus is on the biggest and most profitable brands and retailers because they have the biggest negative impacts on workers and the environment and therefore have the greatest responsibility to change — however, small businesses can address the indicators to undertake their own audit.
Some findings from the report:
Most (85%) major brands still do not disclose their annual production volumes despite mounting evidence of overproduction and clothing waste.
Only 11% of brands publish their supplier wastewater test results, despite the textile industry being a leading contributor to water pollution.
As new and proposed legislation focuses on greenwashing claims, almost half of major brands (46%) publish targets on sustainable materials yet only 37% provide information on what constitutes a sustainable material.
More brands than ever (48%) are disclosing their first tier suppliers, however, half still disclose nothing.
Transparency enables investors, lawmakers, journalists, NGOs, trade unions, workers and their representatives to hold brands and retailers to account by: scrutinising what companies say they are doing to address human rights and protect the environment. Holding brands and retailers accountable for their policies and practices. Collaborating to cease, mitigate, prevent and remedy environmental and human rights abuses. Collaborating to share strategies and best practice on these issues.
Public disclosure also enables us as consumers to make more informed decisions about our purchases (provided we know where to look for the information), and gives us some clout to hold the fashion businesses to account too. In a way it declutters the complexity of such data — and particularly with this Index — because it gives us a values focus. Are we concerned about, for instance, living wages, overconsumption, race and gender, sustainable materials, water and chemicals — or all of the above.
Download the Fashion Transparency Index 2022 directly here, or head to Fashion Revolution’s website for more context. You can also download the methodology and data sets if you want to take a closer look.
Transparency is not to be confused with sustainability.
Transparency is a tool for change, rather than a measurement of what is and isn’t sustainable. The brands and retailers highlighted in the Fashion Transparency Index have been specifically selected as they are the ones creating the most negative social and environmental impacts. Therefore, even if they’re disclosing information more than others, it doesn’t mean that they have more sustainable practices. They’re just more honest about what they’re doing.
As a consumer then, if you see a brand stating that they are transparent, then these days that brand will likely have some fairly successful sustainability measures in place and they want to shout about them. However, the most transparent companies are realistic in their sustainability offering; they are inviting you to go on the journey with them. Take Patagonia as an example, or Belgian ex-brand Honest by, or knitwear brand Sheep Inc.
But, as the Fashion Transparency Index continues to show, the most transparent brands are in fact the likes of giants H&M, Adidas and Esprit (and Patagonia). The continuation of such indexes, and the ability to directly ask brands (or rather the comms team) about something you feel uncertain about in the behaviour or language, is giving citizens more of a hand to deal.
Transparency informs us of the ingredients.
Trust is an essential ingredient in a well-functioning food system. ~ Food Ethics Council
Trust can be established through the action and practice of transparency. So implementing transparency as an ingredient in a complex system also presents an opportunity to highlight the other — literally more tangible — ingredients.
Whether you’re looking at a long industrialised chain or a slow artisanal chain, and no matter the sector really (construction, textiles, food), many hands will have touched your item before you get to it. This introduces the topic of blockchain and traceability, technology that provides oversight on each step of the chain and usually gives some playfulness to the product owner to look back on that chain, for example using a QR code, such as with Provenance for food and fashion.
The limit to such technology is that it doesn’t particularly give insight into the people or animals involved in the chain, or other created commodities, and so isn’t a holistic framework. We can see that this, this and this went into my product and that’s where it came from — yet we can’t see anything that was wasted. It is intangible even when a consumer feels more in control. It goes back to the thing of: you don’t know what you don’t know. So while these ingredients lists look to open up the chain as transparent, it still requires the consumer to be curious to transparency.
However, ingredients lists do support other businesses in the chain to make informed decisions, whether about the make-up of their product or of the conditions for workers. The Manufacturing Restricted Substance List from the ZDHC (under the Roadmap To Zero banner) — a multi-stakeholder organisation comprising over 170 contributors from across the industry including brands, suppliers, chemical suppliers, and solution providers — essentially gives oversight into the chemical management of inputs and processes. This is accessible to anyone to see the list of chemicals used and in which industry i.e. textiles, leather, polymers. It does assume that you want to know this information, so comes back around to desire to be educated. Yet, by having such information accessible to the public means we can already start to question and build control via us as citizens, rather than solely via the retailers.
Looking at the ingredients list on a food packet is sort of already transparent, because for food safety reasons the producers legally need to state what is in the product. It doesn’t mean that we’re not confused by the E numbers for instance, or having to find the * on an organic certified product to see that oh salt isn’t an organically-certified ingredient. But just imagine if a garment had this ingredients list?
Though apparel items do need to undergo rigorous testing for chemicals and quality assurance, each country has their own requirements. Despite a care label being called a “care label” it isn’t caring; it only tells you what the outer and maybe any linings materials are. It also only states the production country. No space for the components, for the fibre origin, for the actual cost. This lack of information is a form of greenwashing.
Transparency somewhat prevents greenwashing.
Greenwashing is what occurs when a business bends the truth around their ethics and sustainability, and we find it commonly in issues where there is little to no regulation, for instance with Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). It can also be a term used against such instances where there is the likelihood of profit for one party, for instance with plastic producers paying for research stating plastic is safer {during the Covid-19 pandemic} — even when under the banner of ending plastic waste. A research paper from Greenpeace backs this up.
“Reuters surveyed 12 of the largest oil and chemicals firms globally. Most said they channel their efforts through a group called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which is also backed by consumer goods companies. Its 47 members, most of whom are in the plastics industry, had combined annual revenue of almost $2.5 trillion last year, according to a Reuters tally of company results.” ~ Reuters, The Plastic Pandemic.
In regards to fashion and textiles, it is metrics such as LCAs that cause concern for the overrarching education of industry professionals and the everyday consumer — along with detrimentally affecting the livelihoods of people subsisting on such industries. In episode two of Weaving Voices podcast, founder of Fibershed USA Rebecca Burgess says in regards to silk, “The fibers production by humans predates industrialized, fossil fuel based agriculture. And yet the fiber itself has somehow been deemed unsustainable by a privately funded US-based textile sustainability tool known as the Higg Material Sustainability Index”.
In conversation with Brazilian silk exporter Joao Berdu, Berdu explains how the Index doesn’t take into account the full lifecycle of the fibre. So as a consumer making decisions looking at this Index, they’ll see that polyester is the most sustainable fibre. And without knowledge of the full chain of how these fibres come into being and end up, then they are being greenwashed. It’s not objective enough or educational enough to allow for informed decision making.
The Higg doesn’t focus on any socioeconomic factors in their methodology, which is demeaning to the folk producing the fibres demonised by such assessments (I’ve brought this point up in a previous LinkedIn newsletter concerning luxury fashion group Kering’s own Environmental Profit & Loss sustainability measures — find Food-Fibre-Fashion edition 5 here). Consumers see that silk is “unsustainable” and they’ll stop choosing it, regardless of any social justice benefits it can bring (and they forget or don’t have means to educate themselves on the true social and environmental impacts other “sustainable” fibres create).
Note for clarity, the Higg Material Sustainability Index is a wider methodology that uses LCAs to determine the sustainability of a fibre/material. Each fibre LCA comes from a third-party — unless a producer is creating their own following the methodology framework.
Unfortunately there will always be companies swayed to miscommunicate, docter and bend reports to the will of their (or shareholder) needs, as we saw with the recent case against retailer H&M for claiming sustainability when using scorecards from the Higg MSI. Transparency here needs to be a regulation, so that methodology like this should be peer-reviewed before publication.
But roll back, LCAs can come under the ISO framework to ensure it is a standardised and reliable methodology; the ISO 14044 standard describes several checks to test whether the data and the procedures you used in a LCA to support your conclusions are well-substantiated. Though if the checks aren’t fully informed in the first place, for instance taking into account socioeconomic factors, then the substantiated conclusions will also not be fully informed.
In a sort of similar way, B Corp’s B Lab Assessments saw BrewDog become a certified company despite allegations of harassment and of support of the Qatar World Cup —yet B Corp strive for an “inclusive, equitable and regenerative economic system”. B Corp have booted BrewDog out and are reevaluating the assessment to have a minimum threshold for each of the categories, not just overall. Methodology and measures should be continually iterated to avoid — and educate on — scandals like this.
Businesses use reports such as the above Indexes to save time on their decision-making while additionally communicating with customers something concrete. Wouldn’t you trust in something that has the backing of so many other businesses?
Ideally everyone should be better educated in all of the factors that affect whether something is “good” or “bad”, and ideally that there is no right or wrong but multiple situations.
In conclusion, transparency can:
⇾ Hold brands accountable.
With or without sustainability measures in place, a policy of disclosure will ensure brands and retailers work to improve their practices, because that’s simply what customers want.
⇾ Be a positive tool for systems change.
But shouldn’t be confused with sustainability. Top retailers come out as transparent through what information they’re disclosing, but it just means they’re being honest rather than sustainable or ethical.
⇾ Inform us of the ingredients.
Legislation that forces all businesses to highlight exactly what goes into their product — and communicate it accurately and without bias — can only educate them and us simultaenously.
⇾ Prevent greenwashing.
Being able to bring a legal case against a brand or retailer for their miscommunication disrupts their power. On a personal level, educating yourself on the grand scope of something — not just the tidbit they want you to see — will only serve to increase your power.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on December 2nd, 2022. Also cross-promoted on Medium on December 14th, 2022.
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