Sustainable cotton is the one that is co-created with all stakeholders in the supply chain
With an aim to transform the way people grow, make, source, and use cotton, Cotton Diaries is a global community of people who are passionate about cotton and are committed to making cotton supply chains more sustainable. The organisation wants to simplify the solutions and help everyone understand the role they can play in making cotton supply chains more sustainable. Co-founder Marzia Lanfranchi speaks to Fibre2Fashion about sustainable cotton and the challenges for suppliers and brands in ensuring traceability.
How many suppliers and brands do you work with? Which geographies do they belong to?
I have currently stepped back from my full-time job as a consultant because I am currently pursuing a master’s degree in organic agriculture and agroecology, and I am taking some time to understand how I can work with suppliers and brands and be a constructive bridge between the textile and the agricultural industry. Having said that, I’ve worked with many brands and suppliers internationally and still do. They span a vast number of geographies from India to Pakistan, the US and Europe.
What are your most sought-after services by retailers and brands?
General consulting and education of cotton, including some fact-checking on their statistics and communications, and some want to understand how to get to the holy grail of full traceability, some are starting to ask about due diligence work. This has started to change from the sourcing/transactional focus they had before (i.e., where can I buy certified organic cotton?)
In the future, I am hoping to work more with brands, retailers and suppliers with a due diligence approach and construct holistic and systemic solutions that work for their unique supply chain and consider farmers realities on the ground. I am also hoping to work on a way for them to support our content creation on Cotton Diaries to amplify farming solutions around the world and make them more visible.
What are the five major challenges for suppliers and brands when it comes to traceability?
Cotton operates within a commodity system, and that comes with a package of challenges. The market disregards who and how the cotton is produced (environmental and social elements) and looks at quality and price.
Having said that, I would like to highlight the top 5 roadblocks for brands and retailers and for suppliers, which we currently found out through a qualitative research piece (with a very limited sample size of the denim industry), but that should give you some ideas of the roadblocks to full traceability.
Firstly, brands and retailers’ top challenges include:
Companies’ structure. Large companies are made up of different departments that too often operate in silos.
Time and money / resources. Smaller players regret being limited by the time they can allow investigating cotton transparency.
Certifications, bureaucracy and obsolete systems. Too much paperwork and between different certifications there is not a place where all are tracked and digitised.
Tracing technologies. There are tracing companies flooding the market utilising different methods and measures of traceability.
and I would add:
Teams’ education. Brands’ teams often lack understanding on how cotton is produced and processed.
Then, for suppliers and mills:
“If No One Asks, Why Bother”. We found that most brands are simply not asking their suppliers for farm-level data or provenance.
Brands are not co-investing in traceability. This often reduces mills’ efforts to source and create a direct-to-farm relationship to a small sustainability initiative that doesn’t scale.
Too many middlemen. This applies to between mills and cotton producers and between brands and mills.
Blending qualities. Mills will blend different cotton qualities to reach the right average fibre length and maintain consistent quality. However, this blending stage is where traceability gets tricky.
Which regions globally produce the most sustainable cotton?
There is no region that produces the most sustainable cotton, just as there is no region that produces the most sustainable tomatoes and no region that produces the most sustainable garments. It all comes down to how you measure that sustainability and who you consider that is sustainable for. Cotton is produced in over 75 countries around the world and the 2020 ICAC (International Cotton Advisory Committee) statistics say that there are around 22 million cotton farmers across the globe, but some people say that is an underestimate and the actual figures could even be triple. Can you imagine how varied the cotton production is from region to region and from farm to farm?
Is the ‘most sustainable cotton’ region the one that provides livelihood for thousands of people? Or the one that mechanises everything and takes humans out of cotton cultivation to provide more efficiency?
Global minority people (what some people would refer to as the people in the Global North) at the moment dictate what ‘sustainable cotton’ should look like, whilst cotton is mostly produced by the global majority people (which some people would refer to as people in the Global South).
For me, the most ‘sustainable cotton’ is the one that is co-created with all the stakeholders in the supply chain, nature included, and that redistributes wealth (and margins).
Can cotton as a fibre be sustainable considering the vast amount of resources utilised in growing it?
Again, I think the term ‘sustainable’ should be clarified here. What are the indicators that we’re considering? I have the – maybe naive – idea that any crop can be sustainable. It depends on the context in which it is grown and how. Cotton is grown in several counties where there is water scarcity at some time of the year. But, asking them not to grow cotton to conserve water is not the answer, as it would have far-reaching consequences both for the cotton textile industry as well as rural incomes.
How do you thwart green washing? What are some things consumers should look for in a sustainable cotton product?
I think the best role consumers can play is to question brands. They may not have a guaranteed purchase, but they have been responsible citizens and surely instigated some level of change. How?
Next time consumers interact with a cotton product, if they can they need to start asking the difficult questions:
WHERE was this cotton grown?
WHO grew this cotton?
HOW was this cotton grown?
Use their channels: whether via email, social media or a human-to-human interaction on the shopfloor.
From the consumer perspective, where is the awareness for sustainable cotton products high and which geographies are catching up?
I am not aware of data on this and would love for someone to create a survey on this subject.
What is the demand for sustainable cotton worldwide? What factors are driving this demand?
Having worked with large- and medium-sized brands globally as well as suppliers and holding tight relationships with professionals in this sector, I can confidently say that demand is high as sustainability is top of the agenda. Most large brands get interested in ‘sustainable cotton’ from a reputational risk perspective or as a result of their commitments to climate mitigation; then you have brands that are focused on building a market differentiator with sustainability through their preferred fibre sourcing. Then, there are genuine (very few) brands who see working on cotton as an opportunity to make change happen, from the ground up.
Published on: 27/05/2022
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
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