Key trends for fashion sustainability compliance?

She says the the three key are trends are:

1. Climate crisis
2. Sustainability regulations
3. hyper-digitalisation in business.

Climate crisis

Chartier suggests when it comes to the climate crisis, it’s about looking at how companies are “navigating the collaboration” that is required to respond to this challenge. For the majority of companies, their emissions primarily come from Scope 3 emissions, which she notes is in their supply chain.

However, she says the problem for the most part lies with the fact small companies within the supply chain do not have the capacity to measure the carbon footprint, let alone define effective climate strategies.

For this reason she believes solving the puzzle, as she calls it, is down to collaboration.

Sustainability regulations

In terms of the rise in sustainability regulations Chartier notes a change in direction, scale and intensity of the regulations.

With the influx of sustainability legislation ranging from Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence – CSDDD and the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles to green claims, it is important to discuss how prepared the industry is for the significant changes that lie ahead.

She explains: “We’ve counted that the number of corporate due diligence regulations has approximately doubled in the last five years. And also the requirements are more robust. There’s a shift from disclosure only to more granular requirements. And overall, we’re shifting from voluntary to mandatory reporting.”

For instance, she says in Germany and Norway there are new enforcement agencies responsible for monitoring a company’s compliance. This is new for companies who were mostly expected to be transparent and disclose their own information, but that’s not the case now with the new processes and ways of working to follow.

Hyper-digitalisation in business

Finally, she adds the trend for hyper-digitalisation is cutting across all areas of business. She says it’s important to mention Artificial Intelligence (AI), as there’s so much to say about how that will significantly affect the way businesses as a whole operate.

Chartier also points out it can be looked at through the lens of helping to solve sustainability-related issues: “We think it will have all sorts of implications about quality and access to sustainability data, especially when you combine it with regulations and how that can be both an opportunity and a challenge for business.”

Compliance contributing to sustainability debate

The session’s moderator Alex Foote, who is the customer success associate at supply chain transparency and traceability solution company and conference host Sourcemap, highlights sustainability and compliance were previously two separate priorities. But this has evolved over the few years.

Chartier agrees and sees compliance becoming more involved in the sustainability topic and contributing more to the conversation, however she still thinks it’s early days.

She explains: “What we’re seeing is more cross-functional collaboration, but not so much ownership.”

She adds: “We need to ask ourselves – what value can compliance bring to the topic and the challenges we’re trying to solve?”

At the same time she believes compliance can be a big driver for internal enforcement in a business as it can shift the perception from “nice to have” to “a business essential or “best practice in the market”. This in turn can help businesses deliver customer value and move towards achieving our desired outcomes.

However, Chartier warns of the limitations of a compliance-driven approach to sustainability as she says it can in some cases lead to a more “tick the box” approach.

Impact of incoming environment and social regulations

“Businesses and brands are finding it tricky to navigate the industry with the number of regulations coming,” says Chartier. She highlights that the trickiest part is the uncertainty on “where we will land with some of these key regulations”.

The silver lining, as she notes, is the “common architecture.” To put it simply, there are some common principles based on some classic regulatory frameworks like the OECD frameworks or the United Nations guiding principles on human rights.

She says businesses will have worked around these in the past and the foundation of “knowing” or having worked based on a similar model acts as a respite between the influx of new regulations.

Foote shares the same view and adds: “Finding the commonality of these regulations and frameworks is often key to helping your customers, it can be overwhelming with so many different regulations and different standards going on.”

By Just Style