Circularity and due diligence: exploring the environmental, social, and commercial potential of circular business models

Textile production, consumption and disposal is at an all-time high, with no indication of slowing down. This ever-increasing rate requires evermore land, water and fossil fuels,  leading to increased environmental dangers such as pollution and emissions. Transforming this linear model also presents opportunity to address pervasive concerns for workers in the global fashion value chain, such as insecure roles, low wages, excessive overtime, harassment and lack of social protection.

Shifting to circular business models is critical in delivering sustainability for the industry and requires global approaches with radically new visions and ways of doing business. This can only be achieved by mobilizing actors across regions and at all levels of the textile value chain, including leveraging the capabilities of and providing opportunity to SMEs and workers. A systemic approach is needed to build transparency and resilience in the textile value chain and enable its transition towards circularity and sustainability.

Part of UNEP’s EU-funded project "Innovative Business Practices and Economic Models in the Textile Value Chain" (InTex) focuses on training African textile value chain actors on topics such as circularity, and eco-innovation. UNEP’s eco-innovation process focuses on enabling SMEs to create circular business models and apply the product environmental footprint (PEF) methodology, which allows them to improve the comparability of the environmental performance of products.

While circularity can bring clear environmental and economic benefits, it is vital to understand the implications for workers and communities, to enable SMEs and workers to share in the opportunities provided by a circular system - particularly marginalized groups such as informal, women and migrant workers. Specifically to understand the impacts on workers, BSR’s Keeping Workers in the Loop (KWIL) convened industry experts and stakeholders exploring the intersection of jobs and the circular fashion transition.

Objectives:

Informed by this research into circularity’s environmental and social implications, this side-session will shed light on the interplay between due diligence and circular business model innovation in diverse organisations, from large brands to SMEs. It will demonstrate how conducting these processes amidst a changing business context enables businesses to continuously identify, and create new ways to deliver environmental, social and commercial gains.