My internship at the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) took place in Amsterdam where the European office is located. The SAC is the apparel, footwear and home textile industry’s foremost alliance for sustainable production and has the vision of an industry that produces no unnecessary environmental harm and has a positive impact on the people and communities associated with its activities. With the goal to create one common standard to measure sustainability within the apparel industry, the coalition developed the Higg Index. It is a set of self-assessment tools to measure the environmental and social impacts of a product or company and to identify areas for improvement.
My work was mainly the assistance of the Project Manager for Higg Transparency. The focus of Higg Transparency is working towards achieving transparency and accountability throughout the value chain, to enabling consumers to choose products based on trusted sustainability information and to supporting members of the coalition to become transparent about their sustainability performance.
In the first weeks, I was introduced to the different projects and got to know how the coalition is build up and is working with all its different members reaching from brands and manufacturers over to NGOs, service providers and civil society. I also learned about each Higg tool and especially about the communication around them.
As part of Fashion Revolution Week, the SAC organized the Shaping Fashion Night, a consumer workshop with a deep-dive on transparency. Within the workshop, the SAC presented the prototypes of their soon to be launched Transparency website and of the Product Impact Calculator. The latter is a consumer facing tool to measure the personal impact during the use and end-phase of a piece of clothing. The audience provided a lot of input and critical feedback on the information that they want from brands and their suppliers, how they want to receive that information and how better to achieve meaningful transparency overall. It was interesting to hear all the different perspectives on this topic. I helped during the organization process as well as the evening itself to make sure the workshop would run smoothly. The event took place soon after I started the internship therefore I had a lot to do right from the start and became acquainted with all the work pretty fast which was good!
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