Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH): Investigating a just transition to a low-carbon circular fashion industry

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The fashion industry is harming the environment and is also creating psychological and health impacts for workers due to poor working conditions and human rights abuses. Much of the focus of the fashion industry is on environmental sustainability with social sustainability largely ignored. There are trade-offs not only between business goals and sustainability but also between environmental and social sustainability practices. Ensuring environmental sustainability requires a parallel focus on justice and fairness. This action will contribute to the thematic European Commission priorities in terms of building a climate-neutral, fair and social Europe, and sustainable fashion value chains. It will research the optimal strategies for a just, fair and inclusive transition to a low-carbon circular fashion industry. This action is one of the first to investigate economic, environmental and social sustainability to understand the trade-offs, tensions and outcomes between these three in the transition to a low-carbon circular fashion industry. By using a novel methodology, simultaneous multi-level action research, this action will take a top-down and bottom-up perspective by examining a fashion supply chain in transition, H&M and its suppliers, in a country characterised by complex economic, environmental and social issues, Turkey. Action research in H&M will be instrumental in understanding the development of strategies and resources to cascade environmental and social sustainability practices throughout its supply chains. While, action research with suppliers, ‘Worker Circles’, will uncover the realities of SME suppliers and the outcomes of economic and environmental demands on working conditions and human rights practices to enable worker self-determination to solve problems in unique context-specific and customised ways.