In Search of Transparency: Fashion’s Data Problem

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fashion is a notoriously opaque industry. That’s a big problem when the industry is focusing on reducing its negative environmental and social impact.

One of the biggest challenges facing the fashion industry in its efforts to become more responsible and sustainable is bad data. While companies are under increased pressure to provide more information about working conditions and greenhouse gas emissions, the data they share is limited and often of dubious quality. At the BoF Professional Summit: Closing Fashion’s Sustainability Gap, Linda E. Greer, a global fellow at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and a member of BoF’s Sustainability Council, joined BoF London editor Sarah Kent for a discussion on how fashion’s bad data is affecting its sustainability efforts.

Companies often lack oversight into their own supply chains, preventing labour conditions and environmental impact from being properly recorded or addressed. Full supply chain transparency is critical for companies to trace and collect data.
This opacity also allows companies to avoid accountability for working conditions and the environmental footprint of their sprawling global supply chains. “There is a level at which the lack of transparency is working for these companies, because it allows them to perpetuate the status quo,” said Greer.
Stricter regulation would force companies to do more, but in its absence Greer recommends companies start by looking at emissions from their manufacturing base. “If you’re not doing that, you’re just not in the game,” said Greer.

Measuring Fashion’s Sustainability Gap

Scaling Up or Selling Out: How Can Sustainable Labels Credibly Collaborate with Big Brands?

Devising a New Social Contract for Fashion’s Garment Workers

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, April 23rd. The fashion industry is a notoriously opaque industry. And that's a big problem when the industry is trying to focus on reducing its negative environmental and social impact.
0:21.3	Recently at the BOF Professional Summit, closing fashion sustainability gap,
0:25.8	Linda Greer, a global fellow at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs
0:30.0	and a member of our Sustainability Council, joined BOF's London editor, Sarah Kent,
0:34.8	for a discussion on how fashion's bad data is affecting its
0:38.1	sustainability efforts. Here's Linda Greer at the BOF Professional Summit.
0:48.0	This is a topic that you and I have discussed a lot and one that I think is pretty much
0:54.0	fundamental to every single
0:56.2	one of the sessions that we've had so far today.
0:59.4	But transparency is also a bit of a catch-all term that could cover a lot of things.
1:04.3	So I wanted if we could start by just really talking about what we mean when we say we want
1:08.7	the fashion industry to be more transparent. What are we asking for
1:13.0	here? You know, I think it's pretty simple and there's no reason to make it more complex than it is.
1:18.4	We want to know what their environmental impacts are and we want numbers associated with those impacts
1:24.8	and we want to see where they're headed. You know, where are they starting and where are they going?
1:29.4	I'm speaking just about environment right now, but of course, this would also apply to labor
1:34.2	issues as well.
1:35.5	So in an environment, it's not mysterious.
1:38.4	We want to know their greenhouse gas emissions.
1:40.5	We want to know their chemical use.
1:42.3	We want to know their water usage.
1:45.5	The topics we've been talking all morning in today's session. And we need that to be tracked and traced and reported on.
	...

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