Spotlight Articles

Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) is one of the leading organisations working on sustainability in fashion. María Luisa Martínez Díez, Public Affairs Director at GFA, speaks to texfash.com about how GFA sees the just-announced EU Textiles Strategy from a global standpoint.

The European Union Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius, is one of the key people behind the European Green Deal and also, by that reason, of the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. Sinkevičius tells texfash.com how the Strategy works.

The EU Textiles Strategy is laudable in many ways—it rightly assesses the dominance of fast fashion and disposable textiles, and integrates environmental and social concerns in its analysis. A fundamental weakness is the limited connection to the CO₂ challenge, and the imperative to become fossil-free or fully biobased by 2050. There is a total lack of proposals related to biobased fibres.

Bangladesh is going all out to emerge as a leader in circularity by scaling its recycling capacity and generating more value from these waste streams. The 2020–21 Circular Fashion Partnership (CFP0 project paved the way, but there were lessons for the future too. A texfash.com report.

The adoption of a proposal by the European Commission for a directive on corporate sustainability and due diligence will have far reaching effects. A report.

The Circular Fashion Partnership (CFP) project that took place in Bangladesh from October 2020 to December 2021 presents a compelling business case to scale domestic textile recycling, with demand for recycled materials from global brands and to secure consistent access to high quality traceable post-industrial feedstock from local manufacturers.

Traceability all the way to the cotton farm remains a challenge. Yet, cotton is a critical raw material for the garment and footwear sector and its cultivation may involve negative human rights impacts. In this context, how should brands implement due diligence when it comes to cotton? Can sustainability standards play a role? The second in a series.

Cotton cultivation takes place in a rural context and the agricultural sector is quite remote from the realities of the fashion industry and on which brands often feel that they have limited influence. The cotton value chain is a long and complex one. How can one ensure that due diligence regulations will not inadvertently exclude smallholder cotton farmers from global value chains? The first in a series.

The designer community of Sri Lanka was a sprightly lot. And then the pandemic brought them down, mostly small businesses, virtually to their knees. It was tough, but now they have got going.

The pandemic was unprecedented, and everyone made mistakes. As COVID-19 variants turn milder and some semblance of normalcy returns, a quick lookback.