Sustainable Business magazine - essential reading for sustainability professionals
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Innovation Adidas 4/4 sustainability challenges faced by the sector. Olans is heavily involved with the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), an industry-wide group of more than 80 apparel and footwear brands, retailers, suppliers, government bodies and NGOs. SAC's mission is to create industry benchmarks for product sustainability through developing a series of metrics, such as the Apparel Index and the Footwear Index. Prior to the formation of the SAC, there was a real lack of quantitative and transparent data on such environmental impacts. "SAC's goal is to create a single unified index that would be able to assess the sustainability of apparel and footwear. It is all in our best interests to agree on what needs measuring here, what the most important issues are, because we can then as a group go to our joint supply chains and show them the opportunities if they bring us greater innovation in these areas," explains Olans. She reveals that she was surprised by the extent of the information gaps that existed across the industry. "The general lack of information that we needed access to, for example knowing the average energy The Element Soul will be followed shortly by the Element Voyager use per pair of sneakers – there's no data set that is available out there. Academics have done single studies, companies have done single studies, but there was nothing to bring it all together," she says. Going forward, Olans sees the role of the SAC evolving so it can deliver such indices in a more user-friendly and accessible way, enabling the metrics of sustainability to be scaled up so that any apparel or footwear product in the market can be assessed and benchmarked against its competitors in a meaningful way. "We are not yet at the level or ability to put scores on products, for example … but that could happen in the future." Such a collaborative approach will undoubtedly stand Adidas in good stead going forward as it looks to build upon its sustainability ambitions. In 2012, the Adidas brand produced a total of 110 million pairs of shoes and 15.1 million units of apparel with sustainable content, and the company is not about to rest on its laurels. The company chose to call its sustainability progress report issued in May 'Never Stop' – a fitting title to a transformational journey only just beginning.