Cascale was deeply appreciative of ZDHC for recently having Carolina van Loenen, director of stakeholder engagement at Cascale, participate in ZDHC’s Convention Week event in Amsterdam. Celebrating a decade of ZDHC’s transformative progress in the industry, the event featured a week of sector-focused meetings, cross-industry collaboration, and technical deep dives. It brought together global changemakers to share insights on how to shape the future of responsible production and sustainable chemical management.
Van Loenen joined a panel to discuss how sustainability initiatives can better align, reduce duplication, and improve outcomes for suppliers, brands, and the planet. The panel was moderated by Janne Koopmans, collaborations director at ZDHC Foundation, and included Carolin Franitza, stakeholder manager at OEKO-TEX, Francesca Rulli, co-founder at Ympact, and Maria Pulido, global advisor, sustainable trade stakeholders and partnerships at Amfori.
Van Loenen emphasized the need to move beyond fragmented efforts, noting that some manufacturers undergo as many as 200 audits a year, an overwhelming challenge which can hinder real progress. Reflecting Cascale's mandate to foster pre-competitive collaboration, she reiterated that most environmental and social challenges — such as factory emissions or excessive overtime — cannot be solved by one brand alone. Van Loenen noted that when competitors align on shared expectations, data systems, and improvement frameworks, it helps create a level playing field and clearer market signals for suppliers.
She shared that insufficient cooperation among numerous sustainability initiatives in the apparel and textile industry has slowed progress, leading to duplicative, overlapping, isolated, and at times contradictory audit and improvement programmes, resulting in fragmentation and suboptimal outcomes.
Highlighting the importance of collaboration and partnerships, a value proposition for Cascale members, Van Loenen delved into some real-life examples of collaboration in action, including a recent grant-funded pilot project with the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) and ZDHC. Developed under the umbrella of the apparel alliance program, the Factory Improvement Journey can help brands and supply chain partners clarify how different environmental programmes such as the Higg FEM, Supplier to Zero and Aii Clean by Design can optimize the use of existing tools without duplicating efforts. She shared how the project supported alignment by creating a Data Matrix, which mapped key data points across the three programmes - a first step toward a more open and interoperable data model, reducing audit fatigue, making environmental due diligence more efficient, and thereby consolidating sustainability programmes. She invited other sustainability assessment tools and improvement programs to join the initiative and industry stakeholders to join existing endorsers of the publicly available guidance.
Van Loenen’s concluding remarks reiterated the urgent need for collective action to achieve meaningful progress. She highlighted the importance of amplifying supplier voices, fostering industry alignment, and true collaboration to accelerate collective action to address complex issues facing the industry. She urged like-minded multistakeholder initiatives to take bold action on data sharing as well as companies to leverage the extensive data insights of tools such as Cascale’s Higg Index suite of tools, and The Better Buying Partnership Index (BBPI). These tools offer actionable insights and are designed to drive efficiencies, reduce costs, and enhance both environmental and social performance, ultimately contributing to more resilient supply chains.