Detoxifying the Apparel and Footwear Supply Chain

Authors

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  Elisa Niemtzow

  Vice President, Consumer Sectors and Membership, BSR

  

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  Elisa Niemtzow

  Vice President, Consumer Sectors and Membership, BSR

  

  Paris

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  Elisa leads BSR’s consumer sectors practice globally and oversees the BSR global membership network. She works with companies in the luxury, beauty, fashion, hospitality, retail, and food industries to better integrate sustainability into core business strategy, products, and operations.

  She helps companies understand the world’s big disruptions, create resilient and inclusive business models and practices, and evolve brand strategy to integrate changing consumer expectations. Elisa also leads BSR’s Responsible Luxury Initiative and the Southeast Asia Reptile Conservation Alliance (SARCA).

  Prior to joining BSR, Elisa was an account manager at CHANEL and a consultant at Accenture and Ernst & Young.

  Elisa is French-American. She holds an M.B.A. in Luxury Goods Marketing and Management from Sup de Luxe, an M.A. in International Relations from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques Paris, and a B.A. in French from the University of Pennsylvania.

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What will it take for the apparel and footwear industry to achieve zero discharge of hazardous chemicals across product life cycles? On April 16 and 17, Advisory Services Director Tara Norton and I attended the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) Stakeholder Summit in London, which sought to answer this question.

The summit brought together teams from more than a dozen brands with chemical companies and experts, industry associations, government agencies, NGOs, and other stakeholders. Signatories to the ZDHC include Adidas and Nike—which hosted the event—and C&A, Esprit, G-Star Raw, H&M, Inditex, Jack Wolfskin, Levi Strauss & Co., M&S, and New Balance.

In her opening remarks, Sarah Severn, director of stakeholder mobilization at Nike, shared her ambitious vision and challenged participants to imagine a detoxified future where  there would be a “museum of hazardous chemicals” akin to the “museum of poverty” envisioned by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.

Over the two days, we explored the complex issues underlying chemicals management in apparel and footwear, including what exactly "zero discharge" means, which chemicals to prioritize and how to do so, and how brands can work with suppliers to make zero discharge a reality in manufacturing.

The summit precedes the release of the second draft of ZDHC's Roadmap, and we hope that signatory brands will rally around some of the themes that emerged from stakeholders: making the roadmap as concrete and action-oriented as possible and putting real heft into supplier engagement.

For BSR, this means moving past traditional training and auditing schemes and combining proactive, internal brand-side management with programs that empower suppliers and that make it relevant and profitable for them to reduce their environmental, social, and chemical impacts. It’s a monumental challenge in human, technical, and financial terms, and one that carries great rewards: healthy garment workers and detoxed ecosystems. I’ll bet the clothes off my back that the industry can rise to this challenge.