Photo by Randall Ruiz on Unsplash
Protecting
the planet is becoming a significant priority as we keep hearing about the concerns around climate change, global warming, and ozone layer depletion. Most companies want to stay environmentally conscious and be a part of green growth investment.
How do we prevent the future while fulfilling the present needs? What should be our sustainable development goals? Is that at the individual level, organization level, or recommending your clients to adopt? I think it’s across the entire value chain.
In our opinion, eliminating wastage has been the basic principle of sustainability practices. Irrespective of any industry, any organization can identify consumption requirements to optimize the process and eliminate waste. AEC, Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry has adopted #BIM technologies. Information technology focuses on #cloud, AI/ML, and Robotics technologies, while the food/fashion industry relies on circular fashion.
Let’s look at the broader level concept of sustainability pillars.
- People,
- Economy and
- Environment.
For this discussion, I am focusing only Environmental pillar. The best practice is to categorize the problems and map them against the new goals. Below are the known challenges that can help identify sustainable development goals for the environmental pillar.
For any one of these segments, one has to understand the value chain and identify the areas that one can control/contribute. Adopt at the individual level, be a champion for your team and help optimize the processes at the organization level to educate others. #Don’t look up to solve these problems or rely on leadership to solve them for you.
For the fashion/clothing and accessories industry, sustainability development goals would be minimizing CO2 emissions, water consumption, and reduction/elimination of wastage. The simple mechanism of sustainable practice can be Circular fashion.
Can we measure these across the chain?
Can we measure these across the chain? Do we know the water requirements to manufacture textile fabric? How many yards of the garment are wasted per shirt/bag during manufacturing?
At CoolDudeChoice, we have adopted practices to source eco-friendly materials such as organic cotton, Bamboo for clothing or use the fabric created from recycled plastic bottles, aka rPET. For our cool convertible sling bag, we started replacing polyester for the sling fabric with the fabric made from #rPET. Our measurement is to reuse ten recycled plastic bottles for each bag. The innovative functionalities of the bag help reducing the carbon footprint. As a part of our continued efforts, we want to use Nylon recycled from marine waste. Our sustainability goal is to reduce wastage, reduce carbon footprint by making conscious material choices during manufacturing, and recycle to define circular fashion.
It is just a start, and as we swim in this ocean together, we will continue to identify new goals and optimize our processes.
Please comment with your understanding of sustainability goals and identified plan. Let’s join the forces.
2 comments
Hi Tushar, thanks for the link – I like the way you talk about sustainability – it’s very conversational (great way to draw people in!) and you’re realistic about what you can do now and what you cannot and where you are headed. This is absolutely the approach I believe is best. No worries of “green washing” and yet making real impact on the subject – bravo!!
This is great!! You can post on my website if you like?