Textiles

F2F: Please tell us about the backdrop to this new product. Robert van de Kerkhof: We launched the new sustainability report in April. So the story was about how important sustainability is about Lenzing; how it is integrated into the Lenzing corporation. What are the four pillars of our sustainability strategy. And that resulted in what we call 'innovating for balance'. That's the background about what we are trying to do by driving new innovations into the market. We are trying much more to...

It's been about a year and a half since the World Apparel & Footwear Life Cycle Assessment Database (WALDB) was launched. How do you personally see the progress so far? Rainer Zah: Since we launched WALDB the interest in environmental footprinting in the apparel industry is strongly growing. Some important players joined the initiative this year like SAC (Sustainable Apparel Coalition) and LVMH. This allows us to develop even more data for the members. What has been the response of industry so...

An uneasy calm prevails over the usually-bustling textiles hub of Surat. The phrase "uneasy calm" of course could well be a worn-out cliché; but both the unease and the calm here are stark and for real. The calm exists because the strike and simultaneous protests have been called off in the hope that the Goods and Services Tax Council will look into the grievances of the city's traders, as well their cousins elsewhere. The unease, on the other hand, self-perpetuates because the core issues that...

The silver lining that emanated from Gandhinagar over three gloomy, rain-drenched days was as far-reaching as it was clear. The scale of the Textiles India 2017 event, the inauguration by the Prime Minister himself, the ubiquitous presence of a contingent of high-profile Union ministers, and the infectious atmosphere prevailing over the three-day gathering at the sprawling exhibition complex in the Gujarat capital—all point to the textiles and apparel industry being set to get a fillip from the...

Of all resources that the textiles and apparel industry needs to transform fibre into fashion, water is arguably the most precious and increasingly becoming scarce. It was only natural that the focus of the annual sustainable textiles summit, Planet Textiles, this year was water. From the issue of availability to judicious use of the scarce resource and the problem of wastewater pollution, it was an array of water-related subjects that dominated the one-day event in Bengaluru on May 24. Jointly...

The sheer expanse of the textiles and apparel industry can be extremely overwhelming for the uninitiated eye. The value chain of this industry is possibly the longest, and its Indian avatar is crucial not just to the country's political economy, but has a bearing on its socio-cultural fabric too. From the unorganised handloom sector to the capital-intensive retail outlets, and from decentralised powerlooms to state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities, the Indian textiles and apparel sector cuts...

There are few industries that are under pressure both from within and outside to pull up its socks than the textiles-apparel-fashion industry. And there are few agricultural crops/products that that have so much of an overarching bearing on countless industries down a longwinding supply chain as cotton; and in this case, it would be the same textiles-apparel-fashion industry. There have been enough damning reports—some contentious, others not—about the way cotton is cultivated and the adverse...

What percentage of your products (manufactured and/or retailed) are made of cotton fibres (both in terms of units as well as the number of product lines)? Aditi Somani: Depending on the season and theme of the collection, we alter the use of cotton fibres from 40–70 per cent of the collection. In my spring summer collection, 80 per cent is cotton-based. Siddhant Gupta: About 45 per cent. Manish Tripathi: The major amount—90 per cent of the product line—is cotton-based. Pankaj Anand / Anil Arora...

There's a new eco-friendly fibre on the anvil—Austrian speciality fibre-maker Lenzing will soon be launching EcoVero, a viscose with the lowest environmental impact in the industry. This, Lenzing believes, will set a new industry-wide benchmark in the sustainability of viscose fibres. According to Robert van de Kerkhof, chief commercial officer and a board member at Lenzing, the new viscose fibre would be based on three pillars: use of sustainable wood resources, a ecological production process...

Sometime in January this year, a group of 20-odd people had gathered at a textiles facility in the Peenya Industrial Area on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The occasion was the inauguration of two state-of-the-art printing machines that Fashion Matrix Overseas (FMO) had just installed. The sleek new machines had been purchased from Israel-based industry giant Kornit Digital, and officials of both Kornit and FMO were visibly animated about the event, and what it would to their respective businesses...