Just when you think all your work is for not...

I have spent the better part of this week in Ho Chi Min City Vietnam visiting apparel factories. And part of that visit has been to look at what traceability and certification of certain materials looks like.  Ever wonder, when a brand says that their apparel is ORGANIC or RECYCLED, how they know it is true?  Is it even true? Luckily, there are really great standards and certifications for these things.
The strange thing is very few brands actually require and use these certifications to ensure that is exactly what the end customer is getting.

So for instance a brand can source ORGANIC and the product gets made and could even be labeled that way.  But few brands take the next step and require proof of that claim. A company that I work with requires traceability for all products with claims. There is an internal system for verifying that what is claimed has proof behind that claim.
The next step is to have that certification go all the way through to the brand and they can then label the products.

This brings me back to my visit this week.  While walking around a factory that makes apparel for many brands in the industry, we reviewed their new garment factory processes to get certified by a certifier next week. At one point I asked who will benefit from this certification and my contact said, "Oh, just your brand."  I was shocked, we are easily the smallest client of this factory.  How could any of our requirements really get heard.
He answered, "It is the right thing to do and we know that more companies are going to start asking and because this is a requirement of working with your brand, it allows us to test the process."

This moment was a win for me, I have been a [sometimes annoyingly] strong advocate for traceability and certifications for environmentally preferred materials. But it has been an uphill battle to get entire supply chains on board. Now I have my case study that I can refer to, even a little company when persistent enough, can make a change.

Step by step the work gets done. 

Upcoming Events 2015

 

As we continue to speed through 2015, we at Sustainability in Review are going to be attending some great conferences. The presence of so many of these conferences with sustainability, social responsibility, and circular economy themes means things are going well in our world! And while we cannot attend them all, we are excited at the ones we can.




Check out:

5th International Fiber Recycling Symposium in San Francisco, CA  June 8-10, 2015

Textile Exchange's Workshop on Recycled Materials in San Francisco, CA | June 10, 2015

Outdoor Retailer - Summer Market 2015 in Salt Lake City, UT | August 5-8, 2015

Textile Exchange presents “Textiles - A Circular Life” A Global Textile Sustainability Conference in Mumbai, India | October 5-10, 2015

Got some conferences you are attending that you would like to share about? Let us know so we can spread the word. If you'd like to meet with us at any of these events, please us the contact us form on our website to request a meeting!

Small Town, Big Ideas, and the Power of Sharing

I attended a locally sponsored, sustainability themed business plan a couple weeks ago in my relatively new hometown of Hood River, OR. It was incredible how diverse the ideas were, how each contestant incorporated the idea of "sustainability" differently into their business model. And it also reminded me how ideas are a resource that is hard to waste, but it is still possible.

There is a magical thing about creativity and ideas - for me it is represented most accurately in Chef Gusteau's motto in Ratatouille, "Anyone can cook" and his true meaning of, "not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere."
Ideas are the same. People are amazing. All over the world, in big cities, in little towns, in hot climates, in cold weather, people are coming up with innovative ideas that can change the world. Whether you define that world as the giant globe we live on or your own tight knit community.

And these ideas, in this new interconnected, somewhat democratized world of social media and the Internet and so on, can be shared. And can grow. It is amazing what you can do with an idea.

And these ideas come so easily into your head. Some are tossed aside. Some wake you up in the middle of the night, and convinced you'll never forget such an epiphany, you decide to not write it down only to wake up sadly unable to remember. But the power of ideas is in sharing. As I saw at the business plan competition.

Sharing ideas is not additive. It is not even multiplicative. Sharing your good idea with the right people is like adding an exponent! And who are the right people? You don't know! Everyone who knows someone who knows someone who knows something about exactly what you are trying to do. The power of great ideas comes in new perspectives and pressure tests and disagreements. And that is a very exciting thing, to live at a time when our ideas have greater access to all these things than ever before.

And while each contestant stood up on stage, and her or his plea in one way or another for the prize money, I realized as each person stepped off stage and were bombarded by people with feedback and networking connections, the power of that night did not exist in the winnings, it existed in everyone being there. Listening. Sharing.