Even though Boardroom Eco Apparel is continuously monitoring and reducing its environmental footprint, the company’s CEO acknowledges that it will never be able to offer clothing that is truly environmentally friendly.
“It doesn’t matter how you slice it, I’m using energy, dyes and chemicals – and these things have an impact,” said Mark Trotzuk.
By the time a garment travels from the crop stage to the sewing shop and onto the consumer’s back, its environmental footprint can grow quite large.
While some clothing retailers may be quick to flaunt their green credentials, they have little control over a garment’s life cycle and therefore little control over the environmental impact of the clothing they sell.
Trotzuk therefore takes another approach to green marketing: honesty.
Boardroom promotes a handful of certifications that it uses to assure the customer that it’s reducing its environmental footprint. But it doesn’t claim to sell environmentally friendly clothing.
Trotzuk accepts that, at best, the company can show customers how and why it’s trying to take more control over the supply chain of its garments. Among Trotzuk’s challenges as a retailer is knowing where to look next to further reduce the company’s footprint.
He will be giving fellow retailers, designers, consumers, agencies and other attendees of Eco-Fashion Week, held from September 27 to 30 in Vancouver, his insights into the importance and challenge of learning what, where and how each, thread, button, accessory and fabric is produced before becoming clothing on store shelves.
Trotzuk said there are questions that eco-conscious retailers must answer at each step of the supply chain.
For example, is it better to source organic cotton fabric or recycled polyester?
Due to the energy, land, labour and water used to create organic cotton and given its marginal yields, Trotzuk said recycled polyester is a better option because it’s created from existing materials like melted-down plastic bottles.
After sourcing a fabric, Trotzuk has to consider the impact of the dyes and other chemicals that are used in the processing.
Emissions generated by shipping fabrics and dyes, from their source to a manufacturing plants, can offset steps a retailer takes to reduce the environmental impact of processes earlier in the supply chain.
Given the challenge of controlling their supply chains, retailers like Boardroom are adopting eco-certifications that are slowly emerging as standards in clothing production. Boardroom pays $20,000 annually to use the Bluesign certification, which was developed for the textile industry by Switzerland’s Bluesign Technologies AG.
Bluesign ensures suppliers and processing facilities that are part of the Bluesign network are mitigating their environmental footprint.
In sourcing products from that network, Boardroom and other Bluesign-approved retailers are assured that their supply chain is being regulated in some capacity. Trotzuk believes that without certification, retailers can’t substantiate their environmental claims.
While 95% of Boardroom’s sourced fabrics are Bluesign-approved, only 10% of Boardroom’s line is. Trotzuk can’t attach the Bluesign label to all of Boardroom’s clothing because the company has had difficulty finding Bluesign-approved vendors that sell smaller components like thread and buttons.
Cost is another issue. For example, recycled polyester was costing Trotzuk up to 30% more than normal polyester, although, as more producers of recycled polyester emerge, the price tag for the fabric declines.
And even though the company is taking such steps as recycling the floor cuttings in its sewing shop, Trotzuk said he still has little control over what happens to his apparel once it’s out the door.
That’s where the eco-conscience of the consumer comes in, to eventually either throw the fabric away, recycle it or make it a hand-me-down.
Greg Scott, material development and sourcing manager for Vancouver’s Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), said there are a growing number of initiatives, standards and tools available to industry to help break down the complexity of product life-cycle analysis (LCA).
But he said challenges with LCAs include getting access to real manufacturing data, taking the time required to undergo each individual LCA and the high expense of each LCA.
“It is not realistic to think that comprehensive LCAs can be done for every product on the market,” Scott said in an email. “However, industry is trying to take a more collaborative approach to allow sharing of data, which may be able to be applied across larger groups of products and focus efforts toward highest areas of concern.”
MEC, which uses the Bluesign standard for its textile processing, is also collaborating with the Outdoor Industry Association’s Eco Working Group to create a product-level Eco Index as a product life-cycle framework.
Scott said indicator scoring being created by the working group will help designers, product managers and manufacturers determine their overall progress toward reductions.
He added that the overall goal of BlueSign and the Eco Index is to reduce the environmental impact of garment- makers and retailers and make textile manufacturing more efficient to ensure that businesses remain profitable.
On clothing that has a reduced environmental impact, MEC promotes a product-sustainability icon as an attribute of the product.
“However ‘eco-friendly’ is not what we sell,” said Scott. “It’s one of the lenses through which we determine how we do business.” •
- September 27-30 Creekside Community Centre, Vancouver’s Olympic Village, 1 Athletes Way, Vancouver www.ecofashion-week.com