BEIJING – Levi’s is the world’s top ranked apparel brand in a report which assesses leading global brands on their green supply chain practices in Asia. The next best placed apparel brands are C&A, followed by Nike, both of which are which major risers in the list. Primark, H&M, Inditex and Target are all also in the top ten in the report, which indicates that the apparel industry is pressing suppliers in Asia harder than ever on textile pollution information disclosure.
The brands are rated in the fifth version of the Green Supply Chain CITI (Corporate Information Transparency Index) evaluation report, published by Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). The report aims to use environmental big data to generate solutions to help leading multinational and local brands develop green procurement on a greater scale. In all, 306 brands were ranked, 76 in the textile and apparel sectors.
CITI was jointly developed by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). IPE uses this index to score brands using government compliance data, online monitoring data, and third-party environmental audits, as well as trends in the environmental performance of factories in the brands’ supply chains.
The latest report arrives at a time when China is intensifying environmental supervision. “China’s environmental enforcement has significantly strengthened and environmental information disclosure continues to expand,” says the report.
“The increase in intensity of law enforcement can, in the long run, motivate enterprises to reduce their own emissions and assume primary responsibility for environmental rectification, gradually reversing the conditions in which bad performers outperform good performers.”
The latest report shows a huge spike in the number of apparel brands which are using the IPE’s database to screen their Chinese suppliers for environmental compliance and push them to disclose information.
The report also shows that ten apparel retailers have now joined the IPE Green Supply Chain Map, the only tool in the world to openly link leading multinational corporations to their suppliers’ environmental performance. Based on publicly available data from the Chinese government, IPE’s database and map provide real-time data and historical trends in air pollution emissions and wastewater discharge for nearly 15,000 major industrial facilities in China and access to environmental supervision records for over half a million more.
The ten brands are adidas, Esprit, Gap, Inditex, Levi’s, New Balance, Nike, Puma, Target and Tesco.