Circular tender criteria for professional clothing
There are many sustainability challenges in the professional clothing value chain including water consumption, microfiber pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and human rights risks. From the perspective of a buyer / user of workwear, the most visible challenge is waste – it is estimated that in the UK 90% of professional clothing is sent to landfill or incineration after use.
In response to this, as part of the Interreg NSR ProCirc project and in partnership with the Professional Clothing Industry Association Worldwide, Business in the Community (BITC) convened a Community of Practice for procurers of professional clothing and organisations in the supply chain to identify a set of procurement principles for circular workwear. The key insights from this were published in the Uniform Approach: Improving the Sustainability of Professional Clothing report which was published in May 2021.
Integral UK Limited, a fully owned subsidiary company of JLL, were the first organisation to trial adopting a selection of these procurement principles. BITC provided bespoke advisory support, funded through the Interreg NSR ProCirc project, to help Integral apply these to their live tender.
