ZDHC Transitions to Competence Centres Structure

As ZDHC continues to drive the growth of its positive impact in the industry we have exciting news to share. Today, we will reveal our 2030 Impact Strategy to ZDHC Contributors at our ZDHC Annual Meeting in Lisbon. In light of this exciting new strategically driven phase of ZDHC, we are also evolving our functional structure to ensure an effective future fit approach for the continued delivery and implementation of our Roadmap to Zero Programme. One important aim of the new structure is to enhance and improve engagement within our community. As ZDHC’s focus firmly remains on establishing a strong and effective basis for maximising and accelerating our impact within the industry, it is then a natural consequence for ZDHC to place greater emphasis on key impact areas of sustainable chemical management in relation to life, land, air and water.

ZDHC will maintain its laser focus on the implementation of the ZDHC MRSL Sustainable Chemical Management (SCM) framework across the value chain of the textile, leather, apparel and footwear industry. However, given that the ZDHC MRSL SCM framework is well established and solidly grounded within the industry, it is also the time to increase awareness and empower other industry sectors to develop sustainability programmes in their own communities. Potential communities include the financial sector, academia, and civil society organisations. In due course, these sectors, amongst others, have great potential to empower other industries (e.g. automotive, cosmetics, home textiles, etc.), and we will find ways to share our knowledge and expertise with these industries to assist them in developing their own equivalents to our Roadmap to Zero Programme.

Our team has grown significantly and every single individual at ZDHC plays a critical role in delivering the Roadmap to Zero Programme. Given ZDHC’s historically successful and strong internal operational foundation, we will now move away from a singular Programme Team and streamline our approach towards programme delivery through four Competence Centres:  

1. Sustainable Chemical Management
2. Water Stewardship
3. Air
4. Fibres, Materials and Products.

Adopting this streamlined approach towards delivering, developing and implementing our programme helps us  to drive substantial improvements in generating impact  across our already identified and related key impact areas: Water Stewardship; Greenhouse Gas Emissions; Biodiversity and Circularity. The new ZDHC Competence Centres will be rooted in scientific research, best practices, new innovations and feedback flow from the ZDHC community to continuously improve ZDHC Guidelines, Solutions and Platforms. This approach also enables us to embed significantly enhanced quality management, accountability, and transparency of our work and direct impact on our regional areas, as well as the world at large. Further, in the spirit of the apparel alliance, the ZDHC Competence Centers will drive the content alignment interface to like-minded organisations to jointly work on the harmonisation of our factory-based tools and create a holistic factory journey.  

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ZDHC has now initiated this transition towards the Competence Centres. During the initial  incubation period, members of the ZDHC Management Team will be taking on important convening roles and we will be asking our community for active support as follows:
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        ● Prasad Pant, ZDHC’s South Asia Regional Director,  will coordinate
           activities around subject matter expertise and delivery management.  
         ● Elisa Gavazza, ZDHC’s Southern Europe Regional Director, will be in charge             of all quality management processes. 
         ● Nina Bendias, Senior Business and Resource Manager, will establish             resources and processes for the new Roadmap to Zero Programme Delivery             setup.  

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ZDHC is wholly committed to creating a sustainable future for fashion because the quality of our shared future and the planet depend on it. We are very excited to build out the structure of our organisation to accommodate the increasing needs in the new impact-focused era of ZDHC with a renewed sense of purpose and drive towards our vision, mission and goals. 

We look forward to sharing more insights in the coming weeks and will be reaching out with a call to action for the upcoming 2023 tasks. Please be sure to follow our upcoming announcements and events closely to stay informed about all the latest developments with regard to ZDHC’s 2030 Impact Strategy and the new way forward.