ABSTRACT
‘What happens when you put executives from Walmart and Patagonia in a room? This isn’t the start of a bad joke, it’s how the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (in short ‘coalition’) was born’ (Schwartz 2011). In February 2011, 30 large fashion companies launched a multi-stakeholder alliance with the aim to draft a set of sustainability indicators for use across the entire garment industry (Moore 2011). With members accounting for 60% of global sales (Zeller 2011), the initative seemed to be a groundbreaking step forward in an attempt to green textile supply chains. Especially as it was the first grass-roots collaboration coming from the corporates themselves instead of initiated by NGOs or enforced by governments. At the same time, the new platform was critically received as just another ‘greenwashing initiative’. Many questioned the efficacy of quantifying and reducing negative social and environmental impact done within the boundaries of big—and thus bad per se?—business. Seen as an antithesis to a growing focus on local production and (re)valuation of resources and communities (McDermott 2011), the formation of the coalition could possibly endanger existing work done by organisations such as Textile Exchange and Made By. Greenpeace, which has been campaigning to push 278companies manufacturing in China to eradicate the release of toxics into rivers, said it would ‘keep a close eye on how the coalition works in practice’ (Cooper 2011).
