FASHION EVENTS



What Are The Environmental Impacts Within The Context Of Fashion Events?



Abstract

The Ecological Footprint (EF) is a recent concept which has widely been used as an indicator of environmental sustainability applied to individual lifestyles, regions, nations or even the world. Recently, its application to enterprises has been proposed. In the present study, a textile tailoring plant has been analysed. The overall purpose of this study was to develop a tool useful for evaluating the environmental impact evolution due to the performance of the plant, as well as for comparing the environmental behaviour of different tailoring processes. Therefore, the selected data were those from the manufacturing work. Data were divided in three main categories: energy, resources and waste. The principal contribution to the final EF (expressed in hectares of land) was the resources category, mainly due to the high value associated to the cloth. The consumed energy was the second contributor, while the waste category remained in third place. The final outcomes were divided by the production rates to obtain a comparable relative index, easy to be interpreted by the different stakeholders. This is of special importance for a Company involved in Corporate Social Responsibility and thus meant to have a general communication strategy.

1. Introduction

The textile sector in Spain is composed of 6350 companies with 223,200 workers . This figure means the 8% of the total industrial employment, thus situating this sector between those more outstanding in the Spanish industrial structure. In fact, it is considered the sixth most important sector in the Spanish industry considering its economical results with a contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) increasing from 1% in 2001 to 5% in 2005. In the particular case of the tailoring sub-sector the significance is even higher .

In Galicia (NW Spain), the fashion industry has acquired especial importance in the last years due to the presence of several designers of national and international renown. This caused a strong development of this industry, which generated a great impact in the Galician economy (Table 1) and at the same time contributed to develop this source of employment.

Table 1.

Enterprises classification depending on the income

Income

Galicia

Spain

Number of enterprises

%

Number of enterprises

%

€240,000-1.5 million

118

67.43

227

33.83

€1.5 million-7 million

31

17.71

305

45.45

€7 million-40 million

15

8.57

119

17.73

>€40 million

11

6.29

20

2.98

Total sector

175

100.00

671

100.00

There are near 400 textile enterprises in Galicia . The factories are concentrated in few main locations (Fig. 1). Arteixo is the most representative one, since it is where Industrias de Diseño Textil, S.A. (Inditex), the best example of this major development, has most of its factories (15 in total in Galicia).

Fig. 1. Geographical situation of the main locations where the textile sector enterprises are established in Galicia.

In the last years, there has been an increase in the number of regulatory laws (i.e., Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Law ) and voluntary and administrative instruments affecting different environmental management issues (ISO 14000, EMAS, Eco-Label, Integrated Policy Product, Corporate Social Responsibility, etc.). This trend, together with the growing concern of the general public, has posed a change in management in all those companies willing to fulfil both the ...