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Making supply chains in the textile industry transparent
Knowing and understanding your own supply chain is a fundamental prerequisite for the implementation of corporate due diligence obligations and the review process in the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles.
Companies can only effectively counter social, environmental and corruption risks in their supply chain if they know where, how and by whom their products are manufactured.
In order to enable long-term improvements for people and the environment in supply chains, good, interoperable supply chain data must be publicly accessible. This is the only way to identify opportunities for cooperation between companies, exploit synergies and increase impact. This benefits rights holders in particular. In addition, consumers, investors and legislators increasingly expect companies’ knowledge about the origin and production conditions of textiles to be made transparent to the outside world.
Cooperation with the Open Supply Hub
The Partnership for Sustainable Textiles and the Open Supply Hub (OS Hub, formerly the Open Apparel Registry) entered into a strategic partnership in 2020 to support companies in this endeavor. Since then, the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles has supported the OS Hub’s public, standardized and reliable database of production sites that can be accessed by players in the textile and clothing industry.
Open Supply Hub
The Open Supply Hub is an open source tool that maps textile production sites worldwide and assigns them a unique identification number. The OS Hub is thus a point of contact for identifying production facilities and their affiliations by compiling supplier lists from different players from all sectors in a central, independent and publicly accessible database. In this way, the OS Hub aims to improve the identification of production sites and thus promote closer cooperation between the various stakeholders.
The cooperation focuses on two things in particular:
Raising awareness: The OS Hub and the Textile Partnership are working together to increase knowledge about the OS Hub and the use of freely available data for information sharing and to improve the data infrastructure.
Capacity building: The two organizations want to communicate to all stakeholders in the textile sector – especially trade unions and civil society organizations – how they can contribute information to the OS Hub and use it for their work.
Where our members produce
In line with the objectives of the strategic cooperation with the OS Hub, the Textile Partnership has published an aggregated list on the Open Supply Hub platform voluntarily every year since 2020. Since August 2023, this is mandatory for all members. It is currently mandatory for Tier 1 suppliers and will be mandatory for Tier 2 suppliers from 2025. In 2023, this included around 8,753 production facilities from 62 member companies. In this way, the Textile Partnership contributes to the database of publicly accessible, reliable supply chain information and promotes transparency in the industry.
Internally, this data is used to identify cooperation potential for joint involvement in the Partnership.
Guide “Step by step to more transparency in the supply chain”
In 2020, the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles published a guide to help companies create more transparency in their supply chain. The guide provides the necessary information to map the supply chain and the associated actors beyond direct business partners. It provides orientation on how more transparency can also be created externally and what options there are for disclosing supply chain data.