Sustainability Facts in the Fashion Industry

#wwusustainability

We all know that the fashion industry is one of the main causes of pollution and that it also often contributes to unethical treatment of workers. This means that the environmental and social impact of the industry is usually pretty negative. It can also be difficult for a consumer to understand or find information on the background of the products that they buy. This is where Nisolo enters. They are a clothing and shoe brand out of Nashville, Tennessee has introduced a physical tag that gives the "Sustainability Facts" to explain the production of the item a consumer is buying. They are obviously modeled after the nutrition fact labels that are on food items and bring a similar breakdown of the materials that go into a garment and how sustainable they are.

These tags differ from the normal tags that we are used to seeing on our clothes because they give a much more detailed look at the specifics of a product. The tags that already exist on cotton usually give a very topical overview of where the garment was made, what it is made out of, and how to wash it. These new sustainability facts tags give similar things but also provide grades that score who grew or produced the materials, how well paid the workers are that assembled it, etc.  It's clear that this brand has a good understanding of what "Sustainability" means. They  include more than just the environmental impacts when calculating how sustainable each garment is. 

The tag is broken down into two categories, people and planet. The people sections covers the wages & benefits, health & safety, workers rights & governance, gender equality & empowerment, and the healthcare & benefits of the people who worked to create the product. The planet sections covers the carbon footprint, raw materials integrity & durability, processing & manufacturing, packaging & distribution, and post use product lifecycle. Each of the factors listed is given a grade on a scale of 0-100. The table below breaks down what each grade means.

These exact specifics can be difficult to find all encompassing information on. "Nisolo said its data comes from 31 sources, including the High Index, Textile Exchange, and Good on You, as well as from its own research (Thomas, 2022).

Of course this format is just the practice of one brand at this point but there are many others that are following a similar model that use scannable QR codes that give ethical details on their products. Consumers in this day and age care about sustainability and are becoming more and more concerned with the traceability of their purchases. If more of the industry can follow a similar model, it would be a huge step in the right direction of making this industry more accountable for the social and environmental impacts they have on the world. 

Source

Thomas, D. (2022, January 10). What if you could read a fashion label like a food label? The New York Times. Retrieved May 2, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/style/clothes-label-sustainability.html