Sustainability in Textile and Apparel Industry: Framework Development and Industry Analysis

The textile and apparel (T/A) industry plays an important role in human lives by providing the basic needs of clothing and also numerous economic benefits to the society through trade and employment. However, from production to consumption, the T/A supply chain is associated with a number of environmental, social and/or economic issues, collectively referred to as the sustainability issues. Presently, companies are trying to better understand the sustainability challenges and transform them into opportunities by monitoring their activities and reporting their sustainability initiatives. It is important for companies in the textile and apparel industry to have inclusive sustainability frameworks which can help in internal measurement as well as provide a reference for external reporting.;Therefore, the goal of this research is to propose a sustainability reference framework for textile and apparel industry (SRF-T/A) that can be used as guidance for external reporting as well as for internal assessment specifically for the textile and apparel industry. The proposed SRF-T/A was developed through a comparative analysis of two well-known frameworks (GRI G4 and the Higg index) and an extensive review of literature including journal articles, trade articles, conference proceedings, industry associations' websites and reports from consulting firms. The proposed SRF-T/A was then reviewed by industry experts for refinement. All the reviewers were unanimous in commending that the developed framework is very comprehensive and industry specific. Few changes suggested by the industry reviewers were incorporated into the SRF-T/A. The refined SRF-T/A was then used to gain an insight of the sustainable development efforts in the textile and apparel industry through a content analysis of the company published sustainability information from a sample of T/A companies. The results of the analysis revealed that there is no standardization in organization and contents of sustainability reports by different companies engaged in similar businesses. It was also found that not all companies provide information related to all the three dimensions of sustainability. While there is plentiful communication with regards to the efforts within the social dimension followed by the environment dimension, the economic dimension was however meagerly discussed as a part of the sustainability report by many companies. This study brings contribution to existing literature as well as the textile and apparel industry by suggesting a comprehensive and industry specific sustainable reference framework. This study also provides some insights regarding the overall trend of the textile and apparel companies in terms of their sustainability efforts as well as their sustainability reporting practices.