In order to likely enhance the sustainability elements of the garment business, how can more accountability be assigned to each individual link in the value chain, from manufacturing to consumption? The stylish, basic T-shirt in your local shop conceals the tremendous amount of work that goes into getting it there.
In order to likely enhance the sustainability features of the garment business, how can each individual link in the value chain—from manufacturing to consumption—be given more responsibility?
The stylish yet unassuming T-shirt in your local shop conceals the tremendous work that goes into getting it there. We need to look more closely at the life cycle of a T-shirt or similar item in order to comprehend the worldwide effort that goes into creating it. The life cycle is examined via the manufacture and consumption of an article of clothing under the fast fashion model, given the prominence of fast fashion in the apparel sector.
The fast fashion model is built on the foundation ofreducing the time it takes between when the trends make a debut on the ramp andconsumption when the demand is at its peak.
However, significant events that span and have an impact on the entire planet must be initiated in order to validate this concept. Farmers cultivate crops, harvest the cotton, and sell it to factories where the seeds are taken, the bolls are cleaned, and the fibers are spun into thread in order to sell a cotton T-shirt in a New York store. Tradesmen purchase spools of thread from factories and resell it to mills, which turn it into fabric, dye, and then sell it to manufacturers. After producing T-shirts, clothing producers load them onto ships and transport them to retail locations where customers may pick them up.
Cleaning T-Shirts
Farmers use 25% of insecticides and 18% of pesticides worldwide throughout this procedure. Twenty percent of the world’s effluent and eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the mills together. Over 40 million people, primarily impoverished women from rural regions, are employed in the factories, where they endure long hours and unclean conditions. A considerable volume of clothes gets lost to trends and is disposed of in landfills every second.
To mitigate the potentially detrimental effects of this seemingly simple process, every step in the value chain must be carefully inspected and improved in tandem to ensure that well-meaning endeavors do not inadvertently result in undesirable outcomes.
Taking a closer look, we can put more responsibility oneach individual component of the value chain, all the way from production toconsumption.
Better production
It is well known that garment manufacturers in a number of developing nations run inefficiently. Although these inefficiencies begin long before they reach the factory floor, low productivity there has a greater effect on workers. These result from inadequate pay structures, ineffective management techniques, and failure to use data-driven methodologies for process design.
It is common knowledge that raising productivity may directly improve working conditions for millions of factory workers by lowering the cost of making a garment. Consequently, the wellbeing of these people can boost total efficiency.
The early expenditures and unpredictable consequences of new timekeeping and training procedures make factories hesitant to use them. The cost-benefit analysis becomes less compelling if the advantages of efficiency improvements outweigh the cost of these upfront costs. In response, the industry must support innovative solution providers that are willing to reduce entry barriers and work with the industry to get rid of these roadblocks.
Better buying
The power dynamics between suppliers and customers in the garment business have been more unbalanced over time. A McKinsey analysis on the status of fashion in 2019 unequivocally demonstrates a power polarization between suppliers and consumers in the fashion sector. With only 20 corporations holding almost 97% of the industry’s economic profits, this concentration indicates a power imbalance.
Due to the obvious power disparity, suppliers and manufacturers are under excessive pressure to meet ever-tighter deadlines for completing their products or to accept steadily declining pricing for their commodities.
Conversations with industry reveal that there are often instances of factories taking orders at a loss, or orders where there is barely any margin left for any decent fixed cost.
In response to the financial pressure, manufacturers are searching for ways to reduce costs across the board. They try to maintain modest pay and put in a lot of overtime because wages account for the majority of company expenses. The companies also underinvest in infrastructure in an attempt to save money. The end result of this is poor working conditions for about 40 million workers globally.
Better consumption
The final customers are where the fashion industry gets its cash flow. The only true winners in the sector throughout the years have been the customers collectively. Despite individuals buying more clothing than ever before, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer spending on apparel as a percentage of overall consumer expenditure more than halved to 2% from 5% in 1987. Consistent price deflation is the cause.
Brands and retailers now face consumer expectations of price deflation. Studies suggest that support of sustainability does not necessarily translate into a propensity to pay a higher price for purchases, and this behaviour needs to be changed through coordinated efforts.
Innovative fixes
It is possible that regulations will take effect and require that every article of clothing has the proper hang tag. Hang tags may eventually contain information on every stage of the supply chain, even though they currently only offer a restricted amount of source information. Applications might be helpful in gathering data, and companies could make this better by attaching more detailed hang tags to their items. Using cutting-edge technology like the Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics might provide a more data-driven approach to boost industrial efficiency and give some transparency to all the stakeholders in the value chain.
By putting these innovative ideas into effect, the product may be priced more appropriately as it will help clients comprehend the “story” of the product and the variety of procedures involved in its delivery.