Specials

Across India's garment manufacturing hubs, summer no longer arrives as a seasonal inconvenience. It arrives as a compounding risk — one that interacts with factory design, production discipline, and supply-chain economics to concentrate thermal strain on workers who have the least power to resist it. The findings of a HeatWatch-TISS study, drawn from 115 workers, 15 factory units, and a focus group of home-based subcontracted workers in Delhi-NCR, lay out the mechanisms behind that exposure with unusual precision.

Asia's largest mechanical textile recycling cluster has spent the better part of a decade acquiring the infrastructure of sustainability—treatment plants, cleaner fuels, international certifications. A detailed diagnostic study now offers the most granular environmental assessment of Panipat to date, and its findings complicate the progress narrative: pollution persists, residue management remains opaque, and technology adoption is deeply uneven across the cluster's enterprises.

Argentina's textile sector has shed more than 18,000 jobs since 2023, as tariff reductions, collapsing domestic demand, and irregular imports converge into a structural crisis with no clear floor. The closure of a vertically integrated cotton-textile firm over 100 years old — operating across two provinces since 1914 — has become the most visible signal that formal industrial employment in the country's northeast is in serious retreat.

Recycled cotton has become one of fashion's most prominent sustainability credentials—and one of its least verifiable. No independent method has existed to confirm how much mechanically recycled cotton a garment actually contains, or whether it derives from post-consumer waste. Researchers are now proposing a laboratory-based toolbox that could, for the first time, provide that confirmation from the fibres themselves.

In most global supply chains, accountability has a floor — and it sits at Tier 1. The factories below, producing fabrics and raw materials, operate largely beyond the reach of formal due diligence. A coalition of brands, a software provider, and two NGOs tested whether that could change across nine Tier 2 factories in southern Viet Nam. A report from a side session at February's OECD Forum on Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector.

The UK garment manufacturing sector has long been positioned as a responsible alternative to offshore production—faster, closer, and more accountable. A new study challenges that framing. It finds that the same brands promoting domestic sourcing are routinely transferring financial risk onto the factories that make their products—through pricing practices, cancellations, and contract terms that consistently favour the buyer.

School uniforms are among the most visible features of institutional education, yet their psychological consequences have received limited empirical attention. A new study finds that the visual design logic of a uniform — whether it signals individuality, shared values or physical comfort — shapes students' hope, resilience and confidence in distinct and measurable ways. The research, conducted across China with 210 participants, uses structural modelling to map how each aesthetic orientation produces its effects.

Across four Nordic countries, an estimated 2,400 tonnes of raw wool are discarded every year—burned, buried, or left unused—while the same countries collectively import over 6,500 tonnes of wool and yarn from abroad. A feasibility study commissioned by Nordic Innovation finds the cause is not fibre quality, but systemic fragmentation: missing infrastructure, absent classification standards, and a near-total lack of regional processing capacity.

Climate risk is increasingly being modelled not as a reputational concern but as a margin-level financial exposure. New analysis suggests operating profits in apparel could shrink sharply under accelerated net-zero transitions. Kristina Elinder Liljas, Senior Director of Sustainable Finance and Engagement at Apparel Impact Institute, argues that carbon exposure now belongs inside capital allocation models, not sustainability reports.

Manmade cellulosic fibres have been marketed as renewable alternatives to synthetics, derived from forest wood rather than petroleum. Yet the forest economy supplying them is tightening. Climate shocks, land competition, and rising compliance expectations are constraining the pool of credible, traceable fibre. For apparel brands positioning viscose and modal as decarbonisation levers, the exposure is shifting from reputational to structural.