Keeping forced labor-tainted cotton out of spinning and fabric mills is easier said than done, as an initiative that seeks to do precisely that has realized.
European Cotton Takes Center Stage in Milan
Even suppliers that have been drilled on core concepts may have trouble applying their knowledge practically, said Michael Baldino-Kelly, director of program development at the Responsible Sourcing Network, which has been piloting its Yarn Ethically & Sustainably Sourced, or YESS, project, in India and Pakistan since 2022. And while “hand-holding” may not be the appropriate term to use, he said at a webinar on Wednesday, it’s clear that mills need a lot of time and support to reach conformance with the standards YESS previously established.
“They understood generally the big picture, but a lot of the key components got lost in the shuffle a bit,” Baldino-Kelly said of the program’s eight participants, which include Nishat Mills , Shahi Exports and Raymond Denim . There have been delays in document submission, for instance, that speak to a lack of “internal socialization” of new policies.
Suppliers aren’t the only ones who might struggle, either. Despite training and pre-assessment “refreshers,” experienced auditors, too, often had trouble figuring out where to pull learning resources to assist mills, YESS found.
Part of the problem is that new things take time, particularly if they’re going to have a meaningful impact. The YESS assessment, Baldino-Kelly said, is “quite different” from a lot of other types of audits, so there isn’t a wealth of expertise the initiative can immediately tap into. This means that both mills and auditors will require a “lot of human hours” to “get over the finish line,” he said.
The Responsible Sourcing Network is learning from all of this. With its focus on expensive and time-consuming in-person training, for example, the format YESS was employing isn’t even close to scalable, Baldino-Kelly said. YESS isn’t jettisoning in-person education completely, but it plans to offload “as much as possible” to online learning. It also wants to adopt a more modular approach, allowing facilities to progress at their own—albeit reasonable—pace, so they can draft the relevant policies and procedures as they run through the paces of risk identification and mitigation, practical applications and “becoming conformant as you learn,” he said.
Participating mills will also be required to be YESS members because the Responsible Sourcing Network wants them to be actively involved in the process and contribute to what Baldino-Kelly described as the “community around due diligence in supply chains.” Membership dues, which are commensurate to the organization’s size, can be deducted from assessment costs so there is a “net even across the board,” he said.
Action timelines will also become more buttoned up, with less of the latitude suppliers were given during the pilot phase. YESS’s goal moving forward is to begin ramping up in earnest with the backing of audit management company Sumerra. The firm will soon begin onboarding audit firms and then the auditors themselves, said Jason Roberts, Sumerra’s CEO. As the auditors progress their training, Sumerra will maintain “assessor oversight” by making sure they continue to learn how to conduct the assessments more efficiently and effectively.
UFLPA Enforcement Efforts Must Address Labor Transfer Schemes
“As brands want different mills assessed, we will have a group of assessors ready to do that work in different countries,” Roberts said. Audit firms can begin applying to YESS this month.
Modern-slavery legislation that puts manufacturing supply chains under the klieg lights has made something like YESS more in demand than ever, particularly in countries such as the United States that have explicitly banned cotton from Turkmenistan and China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region because of rampant state-sponsored forced labor. Still, it’s important to know that YESS isn’t a standard, said Baldino-Kelly. Rather, it’s a “snapshot” of whether facilities have the systems in place to manage and mitigate any risks. Cotton fibers often shed their identities during the blending process , making it difficult to determine the final products’ provenance short of resorting to forensic testing .
“There’s a lot of blending, particularly with open-end spinning,” said Patricia Jurewicz, founder and CEO of the Responsible Sourcing Network. “The carded short fibers that are collected from the laydowns happening throughout the day are baled and maybe sold to another facility, and so that level of detail of traceability hasn’t been tracked because it was never required to be tracked in the past.”
All of which is to say, unless a gin sources all its cotton from a single, trustworthy farm, mills need to put guardrails in place. This might begin with something as basic as establishing a responsible cotton-sourcing policy or publishing it on a company website. Companies could then work their way up to producing a due diligence report and updating it annually.
“It’s [about] incorporating these policies into their daily procedures so it becomes part of their overall system,” Jurewicz said. “And it’s [about] identifying the gaps and helping them fill in those gaps for what they’re already doing.”
YESS has a packed calendar ahead. It plans to expand to Bangladesh and Vietnam by November and Malaysia, Indonesia and Turkey by the first quarter of 2025. E-learning courses will start rolling out in October and a second round of assessments is poised to take place in India in December. Baldino-Kelly said the hope is for YESS to conduct 75-plus assessments over the next 18 months.
“We’re happy to do more; I’d love to do more,” he said. “There’s a lot of issues around doing a cold start with training and logistics, but once we sort of overcome those things, we really hope this will scale much more quickly.”
Inditex Backs US Agricultural Innovator Galy's Lab-Grown Cotton
Most Popular
Comments / 0