Last week, the organizers of the new CSRD Awards, the successor to the Kristalprijs, Impact Economy Foundation (IEF) and Van der Molen Environmental Internet Services, announced that twelve companies have been selected for the CSRD Awards 2024. CSRD DAY is a new annual event for both large corporations and SMEs, focused on the implementation of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the transition to a sustainable economy and business practices.
Schijvens, along with two other companies, has been selected in the “SME” category based on their annual report and communication on sustainability.
Transparency has always been very important at Schijvens and is essential for jointly making the textile industry more sustainable. Our entire production chain is publicly accessible, from raw material suppliers to sewing workshops, and since 2010, we have been publishing our annual sustainability report, where we report on all our efforts and challenges in the field of corporate social responsibility. We also communicate about sensitive topics, such as identifying child labor, one of the 10 high-risk themes in our supply chain, and how we have addressed it. We are committed to gender equality in Pakistan, establishing sewing workshops to give women an opportunity in the job market, providing them with all the tools and space to develop their work and personal skills. Additionally, we have developed our own living wage tool to investigate and raise wages in factories, such as recently in a factory in India. On the environmental front, we have implemented our circular system, where old, worn-out clothing is collected from our customers to create new garments, helping reduce our footprint. There is, of course, still much to be done, but step by step, we are working to make our supply chain and collections more sustainable.
Although we at Schijvens are not required to, we see the CSRD as a great way to further explore our opportunities and challenges. We are currently preparing for the CSRD and aim to start reporting on 2024 next year. We have joined a CSRD Collective that is helping guide us, and together with our internal project team, we have started mapping out our opportunities and risks. The next step is to involve our key stakeholders so that we can incorporate their input into the double materiality analysis. We have also engaged Avans and ASP, our auditing accountant, to assist us and have already established a roadmap to gain insight into the CO2 emissions in our supply chain, which is a significant factor in our industry. In short, we’ve taken some great first steps that we are excited to build on.
A panel of experts will announce the two winners on November 12 at the CSRD DAY sustainability conference, but we are already very happy with this nomination!
You can read our sustainability report here.