Fashion’s sustainable transition is taking place rapidly, but not fast enough to meet regulatory frameworks, ensure business survival, or address the ongoing imbalances the sector generates along its supply chain.
The next goal for the eco-evolution is ramping up the scale of initiatives to involve more regions, especially in the Global South, and companies, including fast fashion players.
Taking stock three years after launching The Sustainability Pledge — a United Nations Economic Commission for Europe-promoted and backed network geared at advancing toward a more traceable, transparent, circular and sustainable garment and footwear sector — the intergovernmental institution, in partnership with the Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, hosted a summit at Milan’s Triennale design museum to highlight advances and the potential of the toolbox it introduced with the pledge.
The latter is aimed at helping companies chart their own eco-transition and make valuable and reliable sustainability claims via policies, information exchange standards and blockchain pilots geared at transparency and traceability.
According to Paolo Naldini, director of Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, The Sustainability Pledge has triggered a mindset shift from “viewing the future to envisioning it,” tackling issues before they become evident, as well as removing the veil of opacity that oftentimes hides mismanagement across the fashion value chain.
Since 2021 the pledge has gathered about 800 partners including experts, policymakers, businesses, academics and nongovernmental organizations across key regions for the apparel and footwear industries, but that’s not enough, according to Tatiana Molcean, executive secretary at UNECE.
“If we don’t cover the globe entirely, if you don’t have everyone on board [we don’t succeed]. We need to scale up, otherwise we cannot change the pace we need and as rapidly as we need,” the executive told WWD on the sidelines of the event.
“As long as we don’t have it addressed globally, if we don’t have it covered on the larger scale, we’ll always have pocket gaps for possibilities to disbalance,” she added. “Of course, we all like to believe in the bright, the nice and the positive thinking, but this is an industry, it’s a business, it’s part of the private sector. That’s why it’s very, very important to have a global perspective. And I’m not saying to cover 193 countries globally. But to really have as regional an approach [as possible],” she offered.
Regarded as one of the most polluting sectors with ripple effects not only on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change but also social imbalances and human rights, fashion has many avenues to sustainability, from traceability and the circular economy to waste management — all equally important and to be carefully assessed and measured, Molcean argued.
“One understanding for us was that you cannot really do something, make a policy if you don’t have data,” Molcean said. “How do you measure, where do you start from, what is good, what is normal, what is not normal? This is why we started developing really this traceability understanding, putting some context to the whole sector.”