GUIYANG – A new index has been launched in China which will measure apparel brands’ performance in managing the environmental impacts of factories in their supply chains in China. The Corporate Information Transparency Index CITI is a quantitative evaluation system which has been jointly developed by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs IPE and the Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC.The inaugural CITI list has M&S, Puma, C&A, Gap and H&M in the top ten leading companies, while bringing up the rear on the list are brands including Guess, DKNY, Macy’s and Polo Ralph Lauren. 147 consumer brands were assessed, while 47 of the brands were unable to provide any sort of response to questions about their supply chains.The CITI was released at the Greening the Global Supply Chain sub-forum, organised by the SEE Foundation and IPE, held at the Guiyang Eco-Forum Global hosted by the Environmental Protection Department of Guizhou.“Despite the central importance of supply chains in globalised business core function, and despite the heavy impact of pollution from manufacturing in this way, company corporate social responsibility programs generally focus very inadequate attention on pollution from their supply chain. To the contrary, they focus on where it is easiest to start, rather than where it is the most important to fix,” says Linda E. Greer, Ph.D., director of NRDC’s Health and Environment Program.Since 2010, IPE and partner NGOs have pushed dozens of brands from textile industries to use IPE’s Pollution Map database to identify and address their supply chain pollution problems.Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs said that, “The inaugural CITI evaluation looks at brands that have hundreds of millions of customers across the world. Our hope is that consumers in and outside of China pay attention to the CITI evaluation scores and rankings and use their own purchasing power to make more environmentally conscious choices, and be a force for pollution and emissions reduction in China.“The CITI reflects the brand’s will, capability, and institutional backing to solve pollution problems in its supply chain, and can also aid brands to move from basic compliance to continuous improvement and eventually best practice.”The inaugural CITI assessment looks at eight industrial sectors with significant environmental impacts: IT, textiles, food and beverage, household and personal care, automobile, breweries, and leather.
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