Sustainable Apparel Coalition & its impact

04 October 2022, Mumbai:

Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), a nobel inititative/platform where the foundational spade work was done by a group of sustainability global impact leaders belonging to apparel and footwear industry.

The Sustainable Apparel Coalition is currently the leading & largest alliance for sustainable production in the (T&C) apparel/clothing, textile industry, and footwear industry designed around the theme of sustainability with the good intentions of improving transparency/traceability within these sectors. The key objective of this leading & largest frontrunner alliance for sustainable production is to ensure sustainable production in the clothing and footwear industry.

Preamble

SAC collaborates to create meaningful, sustainable change within the apparel, footwear and textile industry. SAC members represent every link in the global supply chain. Their combined annual apparel and footwear revenues exceed $845 billion. It is no-brainer 'Collaboration is the centre of the SAC'.

The apparel alliance inherent strength is to harmonise its symmetric goals, solutions, tools, audting, reporting enthusiastically, holding common interest events/shows, counselling and training to construct an ever-connected/integrated, end-to-end pathway with holistic actionabilty all along for the apparel and footwear industry per se.

Constitutionality

SAC is a strong lineup of a sector-wide alliance in excess of 250 frontline apparel, footwear, and textile marquee brands, lead retailers, prominent suppliers/vendors, both mainstream & allied service providers, trade associations, nonprofits/NGOs and academia, trade bodies/institutions joining hands in the earnest to mitigate/cutdown the environmental and social impacts of globally manufactured articles/products.

SAC has been incorporated as a 501c(6) nonprofit organization and subsequently introduced the Higg Index suite of tools in 2011 in effect it is a bunch of tools developed enabling brands, retailers, vendors, and suppliers to evaluate and objectively track their sustainability metric performance.

The preamble of the Higg Index is," Working to Protect People and the Planet". The alliance is mandated to boost promoting sustainable manufacturing in the given sectors. For signatories, it is a starting point for pooling trade insights/information sharing having gone down this path seeking to rationalize/the standardization of assessment tools.

It promotes a process of self-assessment around the theme of social and environmental issues designed to measure the roped-in supplier’s factual performance level amongst other expectations.

The consumer side of the business

Today's evolved & globalized Consumers are pretty conscious & curious about WHERE their apparel/clothes are manufactured and sourced from. They want to take informed decisions by shelling out bucks that reflect their values and beliefs while buying apparel, textile, and footwear. Notably voting brands and retailers transparently based on their best business practices and standing to the test of what socio-economic & environmental impact they could have during the brand journey/Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

2022 SAC Annual Meeting

In fact just to keep the industry posted this year’s SAC Annual Meeting is coming up on November 1-2, 2022 in Singapore. It is an event with the underlying objective of its global network of peers to connect, listen and learn from one another, and collaborate on sustainability solutions.

As per one of the industry reports, "Sustainable Apparel Coalition partners with Fair Wear and the Ethical Trading Initiative to help mobilize and facilitate the industry achieve actionably 45% GHG Science-Based Target emissions reduction by 2030 across the global value chain".

Sum and substance

Sustainable is fashionable. Sustainability is attainable. Sustainability is achievable. All the above must be sounding like cliché. It is only going to dominate global fashion in the coming decades. The semblance is sustainable fashion is no more aspirational.

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