Prominent fashion and lifestyle brands, such as Yves Saint Laurent's and Gucci's owner Kering, as well as John Lewis & Partners, have pledged to stop obtaining materials for packaging and fabrics from old and threatened forests, reported Business Green.
Organized by the nonprofit organization Canopy, the Pack4Good initiative aims to mitigate the deforestation that threatens biodiversity and the climate by supplying fibers for paper packaging and synthetic cellulosic textile materials like rayon and viscose.
As part of the project, Groupe Beaumanoir, Zadiq & Voltaire, C&A, Pangaia, City Threads, 2WO+1NE=2, Zeus & Dione, and House of Hackney have pledged to discontinue sourcing from ancient and endangered forests within their supply chains for textiles and packaging.
Joining the pledge, according to Marija Rompani, director of sustainability and ethics at John Lewis, will help the company's ongoing efforts to lessen the environmental effect of its supply chain.
"We're committed to protecting and restoring nature, and we constantly strive to reduce and improve our packaging," she stated. "Signing up to the Pack4Good initiative is a truly positive step forward on our journey to ensuring all our paper-based packaging is from a more sustainable source."
In addition to their pledge to protect forests, the corporations involved in the campaign also promised to support worldwide policies for forest conservation and restoration and to invest in low-carbon, circular fiber alternatives.
According to Canopy, five businesses that have joined the Pack4Good campaign are creating packaging alternatives to forest-based fibers: BlockTexx, Genera, Nordic Bioproducts, Pakka, and Ponda.
According to the non-profit, the "next gen" enterprises' solutions were creating new lines of sustainable textiles using miscanthus pulp, clothes waste, hemp residues, and wheat straw.
Canopy's creator and executive director, Nicole Rycroft, expressed her satisfaction that fashion labels and textile innovators have joined the effort.
"There is no better time to keep forests standing and to transform today's take-make-waste supply chains that underpin the global climate and biodiversity crises," she stated. "Next gen production is the future - we're excited to expand our community of partners working to build a better future for our planet."
According to Canopy, its Pack4Good program has 444 participating companies with a combined value of over $249 billion, and its CanopyStyle initiative, which aims to remove threatened forests from the fabric production process, has 566 registered brands with a combined value of over £1.14 trillion./BGNES