Developing a Sustainable Textile / Clothing Supply Chain by Selecting Relevant Materials and Suppliers

Abstract

The modern textile/clothing industry is facing a great number of challenges related to sustainability. These challenges include environmental disasters and hazards to human health caused by toxic materials, resource exhaustion (water, energy, raw materials), and social impacts caused by delocalization, counterfeiting and other elements. In order to develop the industry in a sustainable and optimal way when producing new textile products, industrial companies need to optimize their production organization by minimizing risks not only at levels of materials and processes but also in the whole international textile supply chain. In this paper, a method is proposed for developing a sustainable textile supply chain by selecting the most relevant materials and suppliers. The criteria of sustainable development include environment protection, recycling capacity, energy saving, human health and safety, and social impacts. Some evaluation criteria have been normalized by recognized international organizations. The method of data aggregation with multiple fuzzy criteria is applied in order to select the most appropriate textile material and its supplier. A new method combining expert knowledge of enterprise strategy and sensitivity criteria is used for determining the linguistic weights of these fuzzy criteria. In the proposed method, the aggregated evaluation index takes into account the criteria of sustainable development and the specific application context as well as company strategies for management of supply chains.