Looking for Sustainability Scoring in Apparel: A Review on Environmental Footprint, Social Impacts and Transparency

Abstract

Sustainability has been recognized as a major concern globally since the Brudtland Report, in 1987, and further reinforced in 2015 by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) 2030. This paper reviews the methodologies and criteria of sustainability applied to fashion products, regarding products’ environmental footprint (environmental life cycle assessment/analysis; e-LCA), the social issues (including the social life cycle assessment/analysis; s-LCA) and the transparency in reporting sustainability. In our review we seek KPIs (key performance indicators) that allow classification of a pair of shoes or a piece of cloth on a scale from A to E, i.e., products can be compared with a benchmark and classified accordingly with a simple labelling scheme, which is easily understandable by the consumers. This approach is similar to those used to classify electrical appliances, housing energy consumption for thermal comfort, food Nutri-Scores, CO2 levels of road vehicles, and tire performance. In this review we aim to identify the initiatives and measures being put into practice by the top global fashion brands. We found that, despite the existence of GRI (global sustainability reporting initiative) standard reporting, most companies follow their own methods or others created within the industry rather than those created in the scientific community. Examples include the Higg index, the Transparency Index, and the Social Codes of Conduct (CoC). In this study, we conducted an extensive review of certification schemes and labels already applied to fashion products, and identified a multitude of labels and lack of harmonization in communicating sustainability. As result, we compiled a summary table of all criteria, methodologies, and possible KPIs that can be considered the basis for a benchmark and score of a fashion product. This topic is crucial to avoid “green washing” and a lack of transparency for the buyer’s community, i.e., business to consumer (B2C), and for the business community, i.e., business to business (B2B) relationships, which comprise a complex multi-layer supply chain of suppliers and sub-suppliers. The UNSDG 2030 “Responsible Consumption and Production” frames these efforts to facilitate standardization of KPIs in terms of structure, criteria, and their measurement. The most common KPI is environmental global warming impact (expressed as CO2eq) based on life cycle assessment/analysis (LCA) principles (established in 2000), which provide an appropriate base to monitor and benchmark products. However, in our innovative review of t-shirt e-LCA, we identified a wide range of e-LCA assumptions, relating to different boundaries, allocations, functional units, and impact categories, which represent a major challenge in benchmarking.

Influences on Consumer Engagement with Sustainability and the Purchase Intention of Apparel Products

“…These terms are broad in nature and signal a way for retailers to communicate with consumers [18]. Researchers must also continue research on sustainable apparel to help the industry, even though active research on sustainability in the apparel industry has dramatically increased since 2005 [19].…”

Impact of COVID-19 and innovative ideas for a sustainable fashion supply chain in the future

“…5.4.5 Circular fashion software and fashion renting app. A single closed-loop supply chain can be reconfigured as a multi-loop system so that while materials can be reused and recycle, products from previous life cycle can be reintroduced into the market as values (D'Adamo and Lupi, 2021;Gonc ¸alves and Silva, 2021;Leva ¨nen et al, 2021). Several studies revealed positive attitudes from the consumer's perspective towards circular fashion (Bielawska and Gre ˛bosz-Krawczyk, 2021;Gopalakrishnan and Matthews, 2018;Machado et al, 2019;Vehmas et al, 2018;Sandvik and Stubbs, 2019).…”

“…To compete, businesses need to find resilient solutions to greening their supply chains while still generating profit. The second component is supply chain transparency, which refers to a company’s ability and willingness to disclose information openly about the original sources of material and the provenance of labour and end-to-end supply chain practices (Brun et al , 2020; Gonçalves and Silva, 2021; Modi and Zhao, 2021). Many companies invest significant time and resources into establishing a system that is able to trace back the original sources and the involvement of every supplier and ensure that they have fully complied with ethical and environmentally responsible standards.…”

Big Data e Tecnologias Digitais Aplicadas à Economia Circular: Oportunidades para Cadeias Produtivas mais Sustentáveis

“…Um dos objetivos do Higg Index é proporcionar a colaboração de ferramentas e práticas sustentáveis entre seus membros, facilitando o processo de medição, monitoramento e comunicação de seu desempenho. Portanto, as empresas que fazem parte do SAC podem utilizar um conjunto de ferramentas para essa medição, possibilitando uma análise comparativa entre cada empresa [Gonçalves and Silva 2021].…”