Interview with Iqbal Kazy
/1. Iqbal, could you please introduce yourself and your role at Lindex.
I am an environmental expert by education and have been working with the textile and readymade garment sector since 2004. I worked in several international organizations and fashion brands during this period. I see the South Asia Fashion industry from different angles and I have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of this sector.
In Lindex, my role is to drive the company towards sustainable business both with regards to social and environmental activities. I used to develop the capacity of its South Asia supply chain to be more transparent and establish management systems to reduce the environmental impacts from their production processes. I also contribute to the development of sustainability strategies for Lindex.
2. Lindex has started to use The BHive. Could you explain the motivation behind why you started to use it? What do you want to achieve with it and why?
From Lindex, we recently published our sustainability promise for future generations where we committed that by 2025, we will have eliminated the release of all hazardous and toxic substances from Lindex supply chain and we will promote transparency and more sustainable chemistry. We started to use BHive as we see that this tool can help us to promote transparency and achieve the goal of removing the release of hazardous chemicals from our supply chain.
3. What has been the experience of The BHive so far? Could you give us a feedback from your experience and feedback from the factories?
It’s really a fantastic experience, most of my factories give me the feedback that it reduces their workload for managing chemical inventory and collecting compliance certificates from the chemical manufacturers. This also help them to track to maintain the stock list.
4. What is the biggest advantage of The BHive?
It is a very simple but useful tool. It creates a good foundation to drive towards transparency in the supply chain. From a brand perspective it reduces the workload of the sustainability team and helps to take necessary improvement plan to phasing out of hazardous chemicals from supply chain.
5. Did you or the factories face any challenges ? Is there any shortcoming?
So far the challenge that me and my supply chain face is that the products of some manufacturers are not registered in the system yet, so the tool did not show the compliance status of those product. For this I think the collaboration from chemical manufacturers is very important and I would like to request them to extend their cooperation so that more products are registered in the system.
6. What would your recommend to other brands how to start using The BHive?
I believe transparency and sustainability are very difficult drive individually. So, my recommendation to my industry peers is please try this great tool with your key supplier first whom you believe are most open and transparent. Once you will start, you can see the benefits and then will surely have a business case to show to other tier suppliers.
7. What is your vision from Lindex perspective for the future in using The BHive?
We want to see 100% of Lindex suppliers using this tool to create their chemical inventory, by which we can ensure that they are using better chemistry. In future we would love to see the status of resource efficiency of each product they are using for Lindex production.