Fashionista caught up with Bergkamp just a few months into her new role at Textile Exchange to talk about how she went from temping at Stella McCartney to working directly with the CEO, the different skills needed for human rights versus environmental work and whether or not we should even use the word "sustainability." Read on for highlights from our conversation.I was always drawn to clothing.
Stella has always had sustainability at its core, but I was the first person to have a job dedicated to the topic. I was originally brought in as a temp to do end-of-year environmental reporting. I had the great privilege of developing everything into more structured activities. My role was to help shape consistent programs and do supply chain maintenance and develop a department over time. I was only a temp for a couple months. A lot of what I started doing was evaluating supply chains.
Can you talk more about the difference between the skills needed to focus on the human rights versus the environmental side of sustainability? Raw materials and farming are the parts of the work that I did at Stella that were the most exciting to me. There's so much work that needs to happen on how we grow things, how we treat soil, how we raise animals, how we treat forests, how we recycle. And that's the area that Textile Exchange focuses on — raw materials, what's called tier four in the supply chain.
The other part of this is that we're grounding in more holistic thinking about climate. It's important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but if you focus only on that and don't include things like soil health and biodiversity, you can lose sight of the role that nature more holistically needs to play.The organization is very focused on materials. There's a peer-to-peer benchmarking exercise, which is a way for companies to report on the adoption of preferred fibers.
I've seen different people say different things about where the biggest impact in the supply chain is. What's your sense for the true hotspots?
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