How Do Fashion Companies Contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals?
A Collaboration between WikiRate and AMD Berlin’s Master Course ‘Sustainability in Fashion and Creative Industries’
Last year we began a conversation with AMD Akademie Mode & Design Berlin. Lecturer Marte Hentschel was interested in finding a novel way to engage a group of AMD students of the international Masters programme ‘Sustainability in Fashion and Creative Industries’ in using public data to answer questions about how fashion companies contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Although there is a wealth of company reporting on sustainability, this data is not accessible to the vast majority of the public. WikiRate was created to solve this problem — through developing an open data platform which allows anyone to take part in making corporate data structured, comparable and free for all.
With this in mind, we began co-creating a research project with Marte on the WikiRate platform to suit the needs of the AMD cohort. The aim was to give the student group the tools to shape their own research focus — facilitating them to select the SDG topics they felt most relevant to their chosen company and, using this framing, to design a project with metrics on social and environmental issues pertinent to specific SDGs.
The kick-off took place in November and the 32 students began an investigation into the sustainability practices of some of the largest apparel companies in the world. Using the WikiRate platform to compile their datasets, they split up into teams to collect data from and analyse the sustainability reporting of Adidas, H&M, Kering, Luxottica, LVMH, Nike, Prada, Puma, PVH and Zalando.
Over the course of the next three months, the students painstakingly combed through sustainability reports, codes of conduct and policy documents to build up a picture of how each company is performing on the SDGs. Much of the data research was done directly on the WikiRate platform where the datasets will remain available for continued research and analysis. Using the data they collected, the groups presented their findings to their faculty and the WikiRate team in February. Each group also designed an infographic poster to represent their data analyses visually.
Although all the companies did disclose some sustainability data, the topic coverage was varied and there were particular hotspots where the groups found it difficult to locate any public data. Areas of low data disclosure from the companies included data on the working conditions and environmental impacts of their supply chains. The groups also found that few companies published proof of compliance for issues such as limiting excessive overtime for workers and ensuring freedom of association.
This collaborative project was a great opportunity to further develop our research skills which in turn allowed us to be more critical and analytical of fashion labels. Working with WikiRate made us understand the importance of finding the right and accurate information that backs up or contradicts the image that a fashion label is trying to portray. — Students of AMD Berlin
We look forward to continuing this collaboration, and want to take this opportunity to thank the students of AMD Berlin for their creative and thoughtful contributions to this pilot project.
The data collected during this project will feed into a larger research program at WikiRate to assess the social and environmental disclosures of the 100 largest publicly-listed apparel companies. Find out more about this project at WikiRate.org.
