Long Excluded in Climate Conversations, Fashion's Suppliers Create Own Seat at Table

Yahoo

30-06-2025

'Aren't there enough initiatives out there working on the same issues?' Matthijs Crietee, secretary general of the International Apparel Federation, asked an audience at the Conduit Club in London on Thursday. He immediately answered his own question: 'There are.'
But the Apparel and Textile Transformation Initiative, which the IAF launched with its fellow trade group, the International Textile Manufacturers Federation, as part of London Climate Action Week, is different, Crietee insisted. Although the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions is generated during the resource-intensive garment production phase, manufacturers typically find themselves at the receiving end of brand commandments.
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Despite their vast experience and local expertise, suppliers are usually left to juggle two things, Crietee said: disparate slates of priorities from an assortment of buyers and the expense of delivering sometimes costly energy, water, chemical and waste improvements. Coupled with the fragmentation of a vast, globalized industry, the overall lack of national ownership and roadblocks to funding, the pace of change has been much slower than it needs to be, especially with 2030—a key climate action deadline by many measures—fewer than five years away, he added.
The problem, said Miran Ali, managing director of Bitopi Group and a former vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, is that many brands make sweeping pronouncements at their shareholders' meetings and then pass the bill to their manufacturers—or worse, their workers.
'You cannot turn up in a country which is the second-largest exporter of apparel in the world, and then demand radical changes without ever expecting to spend even one penny on it; it's not possible,' he said with obvious exasperation in his voice. 'Yes, we need to make this industry more sustainable. It has to be more transformative. But you can't destroy my country to make your clothes.'
As a manufacturer-led program, ATTI seeks to move suppliers from the sidelines of the conversation to its center. It will comprise multiple country chapters led by their national industry associations and overseen by a global council that will provide strategic guidance, facilitate peer-to-peer learning and create alignment across geographies. Bangladesh and Turkey have already signed on to pilot a three-phase concept that begins with an activities, needs and challenges assessment, moves into a 'solutions design' period involving the input of stakeholders like brands, governments and financial institutions, and ending in an implementation stage that rolls out targeted investments. More countries are expected to come on board in the coming months.
It's the absence of a clear plan at the national level that companies can follow and support that's been a missing piece for Felicity Tapsell, head of responsible sourcing at Danish retailer Bestseller. She said that the idea for ATTI was introduced to her in early 2024 at a time of 'peak frustration' when it seemed like everyone in the sustainability community was 'running around a bit like headless chickens' despite buy-ins from senior management on ambitious targets, progress made by other industry initiatives and legislative tailwinds 'greatly moving things forward.'
'We acknowledge we were missing the manufacturers,' she said. 'We cannot fit in Copenhagen, London, San Francisco, wherever, making transition plans for manufacturing countries and then think that this will be an efficient, effective implementation. It's not that feasible. Manufacturers should not just be in an advisory role. It's their business. It's their decision-making. They really need to be in a leadership position here. Environmental transformation will only happen in collaboration with our suppliers and manufacturing partners.'
But despite the frequently bandied-about talk of 'collaboration' and 'collective action,' brand requirements are still being pushed down the supply chain. (Variations of the first were uttered 23 times during the hour-long kick-off; the second, nine times.) Changing this tack would require a meaningful redistribution of long-entrenched power dynamics at a time of unprecedented geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty.
'It is very important to stress that ATTI, which has grown from the strengthened ties between IAF and ITMF, is not a competing initiative to combat climate change,' said Christian Schindler, the latter organization's director general. 'It is much more of an initiative to organize a group through legitimate channels that have been insufficiently represented and organized on these matters in the past. Manufacturers alone cannot and should not be solely responsible for industry transformation.'
Olivia Windham Stewart, a sustainability and human rights consultant who is advising ATTI, described the initiative in a pre-event conversation as akin to a 'little hospital' for the industry, where 'you bring each country and you give the country a full health check, and you're like, 'OK, this is what's happening. We need to focus on these key areas.' But of course, we keep running a health check because we want to keep the industry healthy and productive and buoyant.'
The response, so far, has been welcoming, 'even in an era of initiative fatigue,' because 'we're not duplicating anything,' she said. 'Most brands and manufacturers would like a mechanism for manufacturers to participate and lead, and they would like a mechanism through which to understand better country context and strategies and priorities.'
For Andrew Martin, executive vice president of Cascale, the multi-stakeholder organization formerly known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, ATTI is a 'dream come true' for someone who has realized that a business case for manufacturers needs to be at the heart of the industry's sustainability efforts.
'It's not us going, 'Can you do it?'' he said. 'It's you going, 'We're taking leadership. We're taking ownership of this. We want this to be manufactured. We want this to be country-focused. We're avoiding duplication of work.' And we can carry on doing what we're doing. We can bring data, we can bring some of our brand members to start to look at aligning our programs, but you can lead the country-based initiatives. You can lead that focus.'
Martin was in Vietnam last month for Cascale's largest forum to date. There, in the middle of Ho Chi Minh City, 600 attendees, most of them manufacturers, participated in a poll about the biggest barriers to driving decarbonization at their factories. The responses, he said, were surprising.
'The No. 1 wasn't finance, neither was it technical solutions; in reality, a lot of the manufacturers were saying, 'We know what's needed,'' Martin said. 'The No. 1 that came out significantly, at 42 percent, was brand alignment. Stop duplicating work. Give us something that's aligned, consistent. And work with us because we can deliver those solutions. So I think collectively, this is a great opportunity to drive that.'
Windham Stewart took a quick stock of her surroundings. 'There's a lot of heavy nodding from the manufacturers in the room,' she observed with a laugh. 'So I think we've got a bit of an agreement on that front.'