Business

Cotton 2040 To Make Sustainable Cotton Mainstay Of Fashion Industry

A new cross-industry initiative launched last week aims to make sustainable cotton a clothing industry staple. The coalition, called Cotton 2040, brings together existing sustainable cotton initiatives, industry stakeholders and clothing brands to encourage the use of sustainably sourced cotton in the apparel sector. This crop-specific group is led by the international sustainability non-profit Forum for the Future that offers consulting services, with support from the philanthropic arm of Dutch apparel maker C&A, the C&A Foundation.

The coalition is aiming to push production of sustainable cotton from 13% to more than 30% of total cotton production from 2020. Thirty per cent is typically considered to be the tipping point, from where it will begin to rapidly scale and enter the mainstream. Members of Cotton 2040 include industry sustainability organisations Better Cotton Initiative and Cotton Made in Africa, organic standards firm Fairtrade Foundation, industry initiatives IDH and Cotton Australia, the London College of Fashion, and retail brands M&S and Target.

Work on forming Cotton 2040 began in 2015 with research and consultation with stakeholders and has resulted in four workstreams, or priority areas, to guide the mainstreaming of sustainable cotton. They are: building demand for sustainable cotton, cotton recycling and circularity, traceability of the cotton value chain, and creating a cross-industry forum to help smallholder cotton farmers develop resilience in their work so they can make a decent living producing sustainable cotton, even in the face of changing climate patterns.

Forum for the Future and partners plan to unveil a beta version of a framework for sustainable cotton sourcing at an industry conference in Washington DC this October. The Forum believes that once brands and retailers start buying all the sustainable cotton that is grown, it would encourage additional growing of sustainable cotton. However, the Forum also want to create a demand pull from the consumer end of the supply chain.

Cotton 2040 is being driven out of Forum's London office, and the non-profit is working with partners to look at how to bring the discussion around developing resilience to brands in South Asia, said Forum's head of futures, Charlene Collison, who leads the initiative. Sustainable cotton production tends to have positive impacts for farmers, said C&A Foundation's Klotz. "The adoption of sustainable cotton cultivation practices have been shown to reduce input costs by the reduction or elimination of chemical use, and increase crop yield by improvements in soil health," she explained.