The apparel industry touches almost each and every environmental topic viz climate change, limited resources, lost biodiversity and water scarcity. And Intertextile Shanghai Apparel Fabrics has, all along, been striving to keep these issues at the forefront of people’s thinking.
Particularly in China, sustainability is gaining importance with the government announcing it will strive to promote clean industrial production, low-carbon development and energy conservation to ensure sustainable growth over the next five years. According to proposals released by the government in its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), traditional manufacturing will be steered along an environmentally friendly path, a low-carbon production system will be established and businesses will be encouraged to upgrade their technology.
All this shows that sustainability has been and will continue to be one of the biggest topics in the global apparel textile industry. Continuing to cater to the industry’s ever-growing demand for sustainability products and services, the ‘All About Sustainability’ zone is returning to Intertextile Shanghai with a 10 per cent increase in scale compared to the 2015 Autumn Edition.
Recently, OEKO-TEX launched a new certification system called ‘Sustainable Textile Production (STeP). This certification system is for brands, retail companies and manufacturers within the textile chains that want to communicate their path to more sustainable production conditions to the public in a transparent and credible manner.
Throughout the three-day fair, numerous seminars and panel discussions will be held to offer an interactive platform for sustainability experts to share their unique insights. Amongst these events is a panel discussion titled ‘Holistic Sustainability Performance Measurement: The Higg Index Driving Transparency & Continuous Improvement’. The panel discussion would be held on October 11 at the Forum Space area in All About Sustainability. It will be moderated by Scott Miller, Business Development Director of SAC, and the two panellists Peter Bartsch, Lenzing AG’s Head of Global Sustainability, and Peter Yang, Sustainability Supply Chain Manager of H&M.
