Sustainability | Other Industries Apparel Gets Green Tool

Nike Considered Design

Some of the world 's biggest names in apparel and retail "including Nike Inc. and Adidas AG" on Tuesday launched a new coalition to reduce the environmental impact of clothing and footwear products.

Adidas AG

 The newly formed Coalition Sustainable Apparel 'goals center around creating industry wide index for companies to gauge the sustainability of footwear and apparel products to evaluate.
If the news sounds informed, it's because the effort comes on the heels of a pair of Portland-led efforts to create indexes similar to the apparel and outdoor industries.

In August, rolling the Boulder, Colo.-based Outdoor Industry Association out a beta version of the Eco-Index, on open source, Web-based software tool to help designers evaluate the environmental impact of products. The project was bankrolled with $ 400,000 from the Portland Development Commission and designed with the help of different brands of Portland-area outside, including Nau, Keen Inc., and Columbia Sportswear Co.

 Nike Inc. followed up in late November when it released the Environmental Apparel Design Tool, publicly available open source version of its consideration Index, a tool that uses a points-based system to determine the environmental qualities of clothing.

If that seems like a lot of environmental design tools to one industry, Nike doesn 't agree.That, according to Nike spokeswoman Kate Meyers, when the Coalition introduced a new Sustainable Apparel "Because all of the companies that release (below), not necessarily in 'for a number of us coming together," she said. "How can we get some standardization and commonality and consensus so we can all go in the same direction."
In its initial news release, which takes Apparel Sustainable Alliance notes the indexes already created by Nike and the Outdoor Industry Association, saying that it will use the work as it takes its own tool.
Coalition S 'founding members worldwide and includes major retailers such as Walmart, Target, Gap Inc. and JC Penney; apparel brands like Nike, Adidas, Levi Strauss and Co. HanesBrands; and institutions including Duke University and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
"The largest corporations and most influential in clothing and footwear as well as leading environmental and social organizations have voluntarily engaged in the effort because they recognize the opportunity to get in front of the growing need to measure and manage environmental and social impacts of their products, "Rick Ridgeway, the coalition's chairman and the vice president for environmental programs at Ventura, Calif.-based said outdoor clothing brand producing, in a news release.
The coalition has worked together since early 2010. Beta testing has his own clothing and footwear index is expected to begin sometime this year.Meyers said the tool and Nike Outdoor Industry Association's Eco-Index don 't much overlap.
Nike index is s-oriented front end of product creation. It's designed to influence the decisions of the designers rather than judge the final product. It's limited to this only for clothing, although the company plans to release a similar tool for footwear design, assessment and evaluation of water content sometime this year.
The Eco-Index, by contrast is designed for a wide range of products, studying every item's entire lifecycle, from sourcing of materials for packaging labor conditions.
The scope and functionality of the reach of Sustainable Apparel Coalition 's fuzzy index.
But Meyers said that within a competitive industry, this is one area in which to share trade secrets.
"There's definitely a place for competition, but this is a space where we see a need for collaboration," she said.