Supply Chain Disclosure and Sustainability in the Textile and Apparel Industry

Sustainability has become an important issue on corporate agendas. Firms aim to improve not only their internal sustainability performance, but also their suppliers’ environmental and social compliance. As part of these efforts, firms started to voluntarily reveal their supplier lists to the public. For instance, Marks and Spencer shares the name, location, factory demographics of their suppliers world-wide on an interactive map. Similarly, H&M lists not only their first-tier, but also second-tier suppliers’ information such as the number of workers, address and sustainability grading (i.e. gold, silver). However, it is not clear if disclosing supplier information indeed improves suppliers’ sustainability efforts.

In order to identify the different approaches for disclosing supplier information and the effect on suppliers’ sustainability practices, in this project the students as a team will i) review recent academic articles on the topic, ii) collect and analyze secondary data from supplier lists of textile retailers and websites of textile suppliers in Turkey, and iii) conduct interviews with supplier firms.

Students interested in this project should have good analytical-thinking and writing skills as well as have a clear interest and/or background in sustainability and supply chain topics. Expertise in contacting companies and conducting interviews is also a plus. The interested students should sent a motivation letter to the project supervisor (melek.ates@sabanciuniv.edu).