Goals and progress
Environment | Our program in action
Mills sustainability
Location: Worldwide
Summary: Fabric mills have an impact on the environment. We’re working to improve environmental practices at the mills that make the fabric for our clothes.
Over the past few years, we’ve made significant progress in workers’ rights, health and safety, and the environment. Most of our work has focused on the parts of our supply chain in which we have the most control — namely, the cut-and-sew factories with which Gap Inc. contracts.
Our next challenge is to move deeper into the supply chain, to the mills that convert raw materials such as cotton into the fabric used in our clothes. Our aim is to help these mills improve their environmental practices — from developing an environmental management system to using environmentally-friendly dyes.
We believe that collaboration is the best route to such change.
In 2007, we helped form the Apparel, Mills and Sundries working group, a forum of ten leading apparel and retail companies that work in partnership with their suppliers. The group is committed to moving away from top-down, “pass-fail” auditing toward a more collaborative, transparent approach that emphasizes mutual gains. In other words, some of our work involves encouraging mills to see how much they, too, stand to benefit from implementing more sustainable practices.
The working group has developed a set of guiding principles, tools and processes that suppliers must use to improve their operations. It has asked an initial pool of suppliers to sign on to its principles and complete an external assessment and remediation plan for at least 25 or 25 percent (whichever is higher) of their approved third-party providers by year end 2009.
Finally, the working group has called on this first round of suppliers to create a strategic plan for developing their own management systems — a fundamental step as suppliers assume responsibility for overseeing and improving their practices.
Learn more at http://bsr.org/consulting/working-groups/apparel-sundries.cfm
