Sustainability approaches within the fashion industry: the supplier perspective

ABSTRACT This paper explores sustainability drivers and practices within the Italian fashion industry, a challenging industry with strong impacts on sustainability. More specifically, this research aims to identify the different sustainability approaches adopted by Italian fashion suppliers in terms of the internal and external sustainability practices and drivers that trigger sustainability initiatives in relation to each approach. Based on an investigation of twelve case studies, we propose a taxonomy of these approaches by adopting the supplier perspective, a novelty in the sustainability literature. We discovered four types of approaches that we labelled: under-exploited, not-interested, collaborative and developing.

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