Many Brands Of Clothing Supply Chain Sink Pollution Door

Domestic pollution incidents always seem to be known to the public because of the involvement of environmental groups.

This time, it is the clothing industry.

In April 9th, 5 environmental organizations, including friends of nature, Dahl, public environment research center, environmental technology research center, Nanjing green stone, and so on, jointly issued the "Research Report on the choice of textile brand supply chain pollution for fashion clean and green" (hereinafter referred to as "report").

The report reveals the serious environmental pollution in China's supply chain of 48 well-known apparel brands at home and abroad.

In these products

In the list, Adidas, H&M, Lacoste, Lining, Metersbonwe, Nike, Puma and so on are impressively listed.

The environmental protection organization sent gully communication to 48 garment enterprises on the report. Only 23 responded to the end of April, and the remaining 25 went to sea.

Clothing brand "pollution gate"

The report issued by 5 environmental organizations involves up to 48 clothing brands, and most of the first-line brands are involved.

Even some of the old international brands that are bright and good looking may also face environmental violations.

For the apparel industry as a whole, it can be described as a great crisis.

Ma Jun, the head of the public and environmental research center, one of the five environmental protection organizations that issued the report, believes that the textile industry has been experiencing serious pollution problems, especially printing and dyeing and dyeing and finishing processes, which discharge up to 25 million tons of wastewater and other pollutants every year.

"China is also a factory in the world. It exports a lot of textile products. Many primary products, such as chemical fiber, account for half of the world's processing capacity, and the garment industry accounts for more than 1/3 of the world's total output. However, pollution remains in China."

Ma Jun told reporters in an interview with the legal person.

In the course of the investigation, environmental protection organizations found that the textile industry has a large volume of water and rarely circulate, basically after simple treatment.

The waste water produced by printing and dyeing processes is complex and may contain many harmful substances.

"Many textile enterprises do not even meet the basic environmental standards. In our database, there are more than 6000 textile enterprises with illegal records."

Ma Jun said that since 2006, the public and environmental research center has been running a water pollution database.

The database contains the list of illegal and excessive emission enterprises and related records. These records accumulate year after year.

Some of these enterprises have serious problems, including privately built underground pipelines, direct sewage disposal, and improper use of water pollution equipment.

In these enterprises, there are many international and domestic suppliers of large brands.

"This time just sort out some of the textile industry, especially combing the supply relationship between them and famous brands."

Ma Jun said that after sorting out the list of suspected suppliers, the environmental protection organizations sent relevant questions to 48 brands on March 22nd, 26 and 29, respectively. Up to now, 23 clothing brands have responded, some of them have responded positively, but more than half of the brands have yet to respond.

So many famous clothing brands.

All of them are suspected of environmental violations. Are some green and environmentally-friendly brands overlooking their due social responsibilities?

"The reason for this phenomenon is fundamentally the lack of awareness of environmental protection in the main body of business activities.

More precisely, enterprises only regard environmental regulation as external restrictions imposed on them, fail to recognize the ethical justification of environmental regulation, and do not think that breaking the law of environmental protection has a moral level of denouncement.

Wang Shekun, a research center of resources, energy and environmental law of Peking University, told reporters in an interview with "legal person" that under the domination of this kind of ideological understanding, enterprises will not hesitate to violate the requirements of environmental regulation to reduce economic costs.

And the disclosure of the incident is also the action of environmental protection organizations. The government agencies that should have assumed regulatory responsibilities seem to be silent.

In Wang Shekun's view, compared with the enthusiasm of non-governmental environmental protection organizations, the environmental administrative organs' actions in environmental protection law enforcement are not satisfactory.

Brand VS producer

"We only make brands, do not produce products, so environmental protection is mainly related to suppliers."

This is the wording of some enterprises in response to the challenge of environmental organizations.

This can not help but remind people of the Apple Corp's doubts about suppliers' labour problems.

Nowadays, the mode of OEM has been popularized in many industries, and garment industry is the pioneer of OEM.

What kind of regulatory responsibility should be imposed on the supply chain for clothing brands? How far can they regulate the behavior of suppliers?

"A lot of people are entangled in the legal view of whether the brand is responsible. I think most of the time, the supplier is another legal entity from the legal point of view."

Ma Jun believes that this is one of the loopholes created by globalization. Not all problems must be solved by law. From the perspective of corporate social responsibility, it can also solve quite a number of problems.

Ma Jun told the "legal person" reporter that, as a whole, consumers as consumers have higher expectations for brands. They expect their brands to be environmentally friendly. They also understand this and have made many commitments to environmental protection.

"What we are doing is not very high, but it just wants them to fulfill their commitments."

Ma Jun said.

Dr. Wang Shekun, a research center of resources, energy and environmental law of Peking University, argues that with the rise of the mode of foundry, the legal and social responsibilities of enterprises in environmental protection may need to be redefined. The core issue is whether brand operators need to undertake environmental legal responsibility and social responsibility for acting on behalf of industrial and commercial businesses in addition to their environmental legal responsibilities and social responsibilities for their own activities.

In order to understand the attitude of the relevant clothing brands to the environmental protection organization's research report, the legal person reporter contacted the Adidas China and the Li Ning Co involved in the report.

In reply to the legal person reporter, China said, "Adidas has established a joint schedule for achieving zero emissions of toxic chemicals as of 2020", and has also actively taken part in the project, including non-governmental organizations (NGO), to promote the project.

Adidas also presented a "safety procurement list" and so on to the legal person reporter as a response to the research report.

The Li Ning Co said in a statement to the legal person, "this is a common problem in China's textile industry. It is also a matter for all garment brands to confront.

In a relatively short period of time, Li Ning Co has been communicating with the public environmental research center (IPE) and other institutions, and we will make wider use of public information to retrieve suppliers' environmental performance.

Or promoting industrial purification

In fact, not all enterprises face boycott attitude when facing the "report". According to Ma Jun, a large number of enterprises, including Adidas and Lining, attach great importance to the report and respond positively.

The effect of the report is not only a question but also an improvement.

Environmental protection organizations, including the public and Environment Research Center, are not only "annoying" but also helping some brands improve their sense of environmental protection and social responsibility.

In recent years, the public and environmental research center has also begun to cooperate with many well-known clothing brands, and use their own pollution database to provide information guidance for clothing brands.

According to Ma Jun, the polluting database currently running has collected 97000 records of corporate irregularities, which are mainly derived from the publicity of government regulators and are constantly being updated.

As long as the clothing brands enter the list of suppliers, they can know whether suppliers have been treated by the government in the past because of environmental pollution.

It is difficult for a clothing brand to master these data at ordinary times, because its records are messy and scattered and difficult to collect.

But through the collection and record of environmental protection organizations for many years, brands can regularly use these data to make a comparison to supervise supplier behavior.

"At present, these data have promoted more than 600 enterprises to rectify, and more than one hundred of the enterprises' bad records have been deleted."

Ma Jun said, it can be expected that these tens of thousands of enterprises will be regularly searched, and are told to comply with Chinese laws or regulations, otherwise they may lose orders.

"At present, the non-governmental environmental protection organizations in China are undertaking the function of making up for the lack of administrative law enforcement ability, supervising environmental administrative law enforcers, and achieving the goal of environmental protection law enforcement through consultation, information disclosure and judicial litigation."

Wang Shekun told the legal person reporter.

China's environmental regulation is still relatively loose compared with western countries. When some foreign brands enter China, they will make use of regulatory loopholes to expand profits. When choosing suppliers, they tend to value the price more, while suppliers can only win orders by lowering environmental standards under price pressure.

Against this background, the supplementary responsibility assumed by the environmental protection organization may be quite necessary.

And for persistent research and regular publication of such research reports, Ma Jun also said, "what we want to do is to give them a tool so that they can understand the contamination of suppliers through this tool.

At the same time, they also give them a pressure. If they take the initiative to solve this problem, it will turn from a negative thing to a positive driving force.