Kim Van Der Weerd

by Kim van der Weerd Legislators in the Global North are ramping up efforts to pass laws that hold fashion companies accountable for their adverse social and environmental impacts. However, a key finding of the recently launched Apparel Supplier’s Guide to Sustainability Legislation in the US, EU, and UK – a resource created for suppliers by suppliers – is that apparel suppliers seem to have been largely excluded from the legislative development process. This is despite suppliers being the...

BY KIM VAN DER WEERD, INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR AT TRANSFORMERS FOUNDATION ( Read part 1 here ) What we should – or shouldn’t – communicate to consumers about a product’s environmental impact has been the subject of fierce industry debate. I, too, weighed in on this debate – calling for context-specific data and more equitably distributed financial risk. But I want to zoom out further: what is the role of consumers in the transformation of fashion’s environmental impact, anyway? PRODUCERS, NOT...

BY KIM VAN DER WEERD, INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR AT TRANSFORMERS FOUNDATION The consumer-facing product labeling tool known as the Higg Material Sustainability Index (MSI) is under fire for greenwashing. The accusation leveled by the New York Times is that the fabric ranking system (created by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition) favors petroleum-based synthetics over natural fibers. Less than a week later, the Norwegian Consumer Authority ordered fashion brand Norrøna to stop using Higg data in...