Textile ETP at SDA Bocconi to discuss sustainability and digitalisation

On 17 February 2025, our Secretary General Lutz Walter participated in the event "Navigating Change - ESG Roadmaps to Circular Fashion" organised by the Monitor for Circular Fashion of SDA Bocconi, in Milan, Italy.

After a round of presentations of pledge and circularity pilot projects by an impressive list of fashion industry leaders, several sessions explored regulatory, technological, social and environmental drivers of circular fashion.

In the technological driver session, Lutz highlighted how (digital) technologies can make a good economic case for higher levels of the waste hierarchy such as Refuse, Reduce or Reuse, but how a technological innovation approach alone fails to make strategies on the lower stages such as Repair, Refurbish or Recycle economically viable. The reason for this is the outsized impact of (local) labour costs that are inevitable for collection, sorting for re-use, repair or disassembly operations. As a result, local repair or the use of recycled materials need regulatory market interventions to help them compete against virgin materials and cheaply produced new products.

He also discussed the growing importance for all companies - large or small - in the fashion supply chain to adopt a sound data-driven business strategy without which the necessary supply chain traceability for the DPP or efficient circular business models cannot be built. Common data standards, open-source platforms and accessible sectoral data spaces need to be developed in a collaborative effort involving companies along the full supply chain, industry associations and IT providers, overseen and supported where necessary by public authorities.