Since 2014 she has been C.E.O at INNOVATEXT Textile Engineering and Testing Company. In addition she is also the President of the Association of Hungarian Light Industry (AHLI) and Vice-President of the Hungarian Scientific Textile Association (TMTE). And she currently sits on the editorial board for the Hungarian textile journal “Magyar Textiltechnika“.
What does it mean for the world of Eco & Sustainability to have a new fashion week dedicated to them?
Global Sustainable Fashion week can help to highlight the importance of this area in terms of our future. Environmental protection, providing conditions of circular economy is spread in a plenty of areas. As fashion industry rules and influences one of the biggest segments of everyday consumption, textile and cloth buying, it plays an enormous role in, choosing technologies and raw materials, ways of reaching consumers and life of cloth after use.
Designers, manufacturers and consumers has to be aware being responsible for our future. Also fashion industry has to join the conception circular economy.
Conception of responsible fashion is more and more spread, beyond re-use new forms of fashion library appears as well. Sustainability became a priority among European designers.
This event can contribute emphasizing these trends in Hungary as well, and highlight environmental, social, ethical aspects of textile and clothing industry. With the help of designs can be seen on stage, and workshops this event can give inspiration how can fashion act against factors risking Earth and the future generation, how can clothing, which decreases ÖKO footprint and serves sustainable development, be produced with good design, environment friendly technologies.
Global Sustainable Fashion Week in Budapest will contribute to managing the sustainable approach in the fashion sector:
· showing examples for responsible fashion design (choosing more eco-friendly products and processes, (re-) design, re-examining markets, reusing waste and making well-designed and efficiently manufactured products)
· introducing responsible manufacturers and retailers (suppliers with a credible certificate, environmental policy)
· informing the public, consumer, involving the press and other media.
How will your participation in the lectures help the world to understand better how everyone can participate in their own way on sustainability?
The textile industry is characterised by a form of cooperation in which each production stage from raw material to finished textile product is often located in a different place in the world. This extremely fragmented structure is reflected in the complex supply relationships between all the companies involved throughout the textile processing chain. On top of this, different environmental regulations apply in the individual countries involved in textile production.
Producers, traders and brands can communicate their commitment to sustainability by certificates issued by independent institutes. The lecture will help to understand, that there are reliable certifications to identify and eliminate potential sources of problematic substances at each processing stage and testing becomes necessary whenever a textile product is recomposed or a chemical change is made to its material.
The lecture will focus on the advantages of OEKO-TEX® Association’s label, one of the most well-known and worldwide spread voluntary certification. To date, more than 150,000 OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 certificates have been issued—with more than 13,300 issued per year—and 10,000 manufacturers, brands, and retailers in 98 countries are working with OEKO-TEX® to ensure that their products are tested for potentially harmful substances. Now available are the STeP by OEKO-TEX® certification for sustainable textile product manufacturing facilities, the MySTeP by OEKO-TEX® database management tool, and the Made in Green by OEKO-TEX® label for OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 certified products produced in accordance with OEKO-TEX® guidelines. OEKO-TEX® certified products and suppliers can be located in the OEKO-TEX® Online Buying Guide at www.oeko-tex.com/products.
STeP by OEKO-TEX® makes the sustainability of production facilities throughout the textile value-creation chain visible using a transparent scoring system. STeP gives brands, retailers, and manufacturers the opportunity to have each area of their company facilities analysed and assessed according to environmental and social criteria by an independent body.
The STeP list of excluded harmful substances for textile production (Manufacturing Restricted Substances List or MRSL) now complies with the requirements of the ZDHC initiative (Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals). Production facilities that have been certified in accordance with STeP therefore already meet the ZDHC specifications with regard to the use of specific process chemicals that are to be removed from textile production by 2020. Companies already certified in accordance with STeP will comply with the MRSL criteria of the ZHDC after the next successful conformity audit at the latest.
The new Made in Green by OEKO-TEX® label shows the consumer that the textiles concerned are tested for harmful substances and sustainably produced in accordance with OEKO-TEX® guidelines.