C&A – The 1st C2C Certified Garment Collection

Certified products:

  • C&A designed to be recycled Pacific Jeans garments

Goals:

  • Supply Chain Optimization

    A retial giant as C&A has a very complex supply chain. The brand wanted to assess their suppliers in Asia and America to understand which were better aligned with its goals and had the skills to manufature C2C Gold products.

  • Full garments C2C Certified Gold collection

    To date, it only existed denim fabrics certified, C&A wanted to develop full garments fully optimized.

Main challenges:

  • Transparency

    Dig into a complex supply chain to understand potential issues related to chemistry and practices.

  • Material Health

    Understand product components (sewing threads, zippers, buttons, labels, etc) and process chemicals to find the better alternatives for all of them.

  • Innovation

    Engage the supply chain in an innovation process to meet the company's goals.

Achievements

  • Materials Health

    100% of components assessed at Platinum level for Pacific Denim garments

  • Supply Chain

    Identification of outstanding suppliers both from quality and social impact.

  • Innovation

    First full denim garment C2C Certified Gold

In 2016, C&A, the Dutch fashion giant, together with EIG, MBDC, and Fashion for Good, began their journey towards C2C Certified™ production of garments. The company created a roadmap to integrate the C2C principles into their company strategy, to put into action and build a new model of consumption of safe and circular products.

In 2017, the first t-shirts to achieve C2C Certified™ Gold were on the market. The organic cotton t-shirts, seek not only to be healthy for those who wear them, but also for producers, and at an affordable price for consumers. C&A also proposes several recirculation paths at the end of the use cycle, ranging from the return to Fashion for Good, to contribute in the research of new ways of recycling cottons, to domestic composting.

 Jeans for Good

EIG also played a central role in the assessment of the C2C Certified Gold range of denim jeans. We worked in the field and throughout the whole supply chain to investigate how healthy the input materials and chemicals are for people and the environment, how the products can be recovered after use to become new nutrients instead of waste, how water and energy are used and what is the quality of the effluents as well as the impacts of this production locally (workers, supply chain, local community).

This certification refers to the jeans produced by Pacific Jeans, company based in Bangladesh, with an outstanding performance in water stewardship and social fairness.

The first denim garments were certified on August 2018, achieving Gold level in four quality categories and Platinum in Material Health.

 

Read more about C&A’s journey towards C2C certification and how your product scores at the Fashion for Good resources library here.

Related Posts:

EIG collaborates with C&A to develop the most sustainable jeans

C&A goes further with C2C Certified

 

Cradle to Cradle Certified and C2C Certified are certification marks exclusively licensed by the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute.