Swedish collaboration Sustainable Water Resources (SWAR) for cleaner textile production has won the prestigious 2015 Habit Fashion Award for Sustainability. Lindex, a leading European fashion chain, is one of the initiators of the project together with fashion industry colleagues KappAhl, Indiska and Stockholm International Water Institute. SWAR was honoured for its impact in terms of efficient use of water, energy and chemicals in textile production in India, Lindex said in a press release. SWAR is a capacity building and technical support programme for 42 suppliers and sub-suppliers to Swedish brands Indiska, KappAhl and Lindex in India (Delhi NCR and Rajasthan). The programme was co-funded by the brands and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) and was implemented by Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI). “In this project, for a more sustainable textile production, we have demonstrated the power of collaboration and shared learnings. Together with our suppliers and fashion industry colleagues, we have achieved fantastic results with simple means. And this is only the beginning, now we expand the project to more factories and countries,” said Anna-Karin Dahlberg, Production Support Manager at Lindex. The SWAR factories saved over 360 million litres of water, equaling the needs of more than 3.5 million people. Through its parent network, Sweden Textile Water Initiative, the successful pilot programme has now scaled up across India and in China, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Ethiopia, expanding its impact to 120 factories supplying 20 major Swedish brands. “SWAR has enabled us to over-perform on almost all social, environmental and business metrics that we identified at the start of the project. In addition, it provided clear evidence and data through exact measurements of water consumption meters, project implementation sheets for each implemented projects, and testimonials provided by the factories. This kind of accurate intelligence is often very hard to secure when working across industry borders,” Indiska, Lindex and KappAhl said in a joint statement. The SWAR initiative puts the value of water at the heart of resource efficiency and sustainable development solutions. The approach combines achieving measurable results with building capacities and empowering people at brand headquarters, factory, and institutional levels. It is a market driven approach that creates demand for sustainable water use in production, based on real risk mitigation, and supplies management solutions to meet that demand, the release said.
