As one of the world's largest apparel, footwear and accessories companies, VF believes it has the responsibility and opportunity to use its scale for good. The company is committed to immediate action to tackle climate change in collaboration with their suppliers and other industry stakeholders.
At VF, more than 2000 associates work together in China to create products with less environmental impacts using diverse skills and experience and driven by the associates' deep commitment to the betterment of people and the planet.
The Apparel Impact Institute (AII) and VF partner to implement the Clean by Design (CbD) Top 10 Best Practices program to VF's strategic Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers to create positive environmental impacts across their operations. Through this effort, VF suppliers can improve resource efficiencies, including energy, water, wastes and emissions reductions in their facilities while saving costs simply by implementing those operational and environmental efficiencies identified by AII technical industry experts.
Since 2020, ten VF suppliers have been participating in the CbD program. Five of the suppliers have fully completed the program, achieving a total of 28,207 GJ of energy savings, 458,561 tons of water savings, avoiding 13,173 tons of GHG and reducing wastewater discharge by 240,527 tons. The remaining five suppliers are continuously implementing the improvement actions with full support from AII CbD's expert team. Additional savings are anticipated to be realized by the end of 2021.
One of VF's suppliers based in Hangzhou Zhejiang has accomplished a lot of great achievements from the CbD program, they have implemented 5 types of energy efficiency improvement actions.
1. Heat insulation and reclamation
2. Production process optimization
3. Low efficiency dyeing machines and motors replacement
4. Compressed air system maintenance and optimization
5. Recycle treated wastewater and use in production
These actions resulted in around 14% steam consumption and around 19% water reduction in 2020 compared to the 2018 baseline. The facility is also actively looking for resource efficiency improvement opportunities to reduce GHG emission by installing a 428 kWp rooftop solar photovoltaic system which avoids around 250 tons of GHG annually.
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