Esprit extends sustainability activities

27 Oct '17

3 min read

Courtesy: Esprit

Esprit has come out with sustainability report for FY16/17, according to which Esprit has extended its sustainability activities and developed concrete guidelines along which it will orientate its actions and measures. Substantial headway has been made over the past two years in the areas of sustainable products and materials, transparency, and wastewater.

Since the foundation of Esprit in 1968, doing business responsibly has been a key component of the brand. In the spirit of this founding philosophy, Esprit continued to extend its sustainability activities in the past financial year (FY16/17) and developed a holistic strategy that incorporates the human-centred side (people) of sustainability along with the environmental side (planet). With the updated strategy, the company has committed itself to four major imperatives:

In all four areas of action, Esprit has been able to achieve decisive progress over the past two years, inter alia through valuable strategic cooperation with partners such as Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT), CanopyStyle, and the Better Cotton Initiative. In the area of products and materials, Esprit gradually increased the share of organic cotton and recycled materials in its products and was certified with the Organic Content Standard, Recycled Claim Standard and the Responsible Wool Standard.

In order to create additional transparency, Esprit published a list with all its direct suppliers and subcontractors in accordance with the Human Rights Watch Transparency Pledge. A newly developed training and auditing programme for wet processing facilities including printing, dyeing and finishing is contributing to a clean supply chain. With the membership at ACT, a multi-stakeholder platform that aims to enable industry-wide collective bargaining in major production countries, Esprit intends to lay the foundation for achieving living wages.

Jose Manuel Martínez Gutiérrez, executive director and Group CEO of Esprit, comments: “Last year we were able to achieve significant progress in our efforts toward an even stronger anchoring of the sustainability principle in our company. In this way, we get closer to our long-term goal of integrating sustainability into all business processes. On the basis of the updated sustainability strategy and our concrete commitments, we are confident that we will have an even bigger impact”.

In order to ensure that everyone within Esprit is working collaboratively towards the sustainability goals and to seek opportunities for improvement, a cross-departmental steering committee was launched in spring of 2017 to take charge of the commitments. Members include top management from operations, logistics, supply chain and marketing.

The global sustainability report was prepared in agreement with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4 ‘Core’ level. (SV)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India

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