Apparel industry example

The recycling of the waste in examples 1 and 2 above can be viewed as OLR when the textile waste is used as material in other product systems. When examples 1 and 2 are recycled for use within the apparel industry, this is CLR addressed in greater detail in Section 6.4. 

Consider a coordination agreement in which the retailer pays w for each unit purchased as well as r per unit of leftover unused capacity. Such contracts are termed take-or-pay contracts and are found commonly in many Just-In-Time contexts. For example, it is reported ([52]) that Toyota guarantees that its actual orders will deviate by no more than 10% around forecasted offtakes and will pay for any deviations. In the transportation industry, Reynolds commits to minimum volumes to carriers and will pay if observed demand falls short of these minimum volumes. Eppen and Iyer [29] describe a backup agreement in the apparel industry, which consists of a payment of w per unit taken and a payment of per unit not taken. 

One of the features of the apparel industry is the existence of stable percent-done curves. The percent-done curve provides an estimate of the percent of total demand that is realized at different points during the season. An example is shown in Figure 5.4. 

It is important to note that most of the sustainability challenges facing the apparel industry should not be considered as separate, unrelated issues, because there is a high level of interconnection between than. For example, the environmental impacts of toxic chemical use and the potential impacts of these chemicals on the environment are intimately linked with impacts on factory conditions for the workers who are exposed to those chemicals, as well as the risks to the local community surrounding the factory from potentially toxic liquid effluent and air emissions to their health. Furthermore, there are additional potential risks associated with residual chemicals on the finished product to consumers and to the local environment. 

This scenario occurs in the real world every day. In an effort to avoid poor customer service, elements of supply chains do exactly the same thing. Ironically, the result of these actions is even worse customer service. The actual fluctuation in monthly demand in the automotive industry, for example, is less than 10%. However, second and third tier suppliers are constantly adjusting capacities by as much as 50%. In the textile and apparel industries, the effect of seasonal fluctuations only compounds the same problems. 

In the apparel industry, bra size can be described by two values. The first value is the under-band, which is a number based on the circumference of the ribcage under the breast. The second value is the bra cup size, calculated by subtracting the under-band measurement from the over-bust measurement, which is then denoted by an alphabetical letter, for example, A, B, C, etc. Therefore a 34B bra size denotes a 34 inch-size under-band and a B bra cup size (Pandamm, 2009). 

Nowadays there are two of the hottest trends now among CSR executives are supply chains and collaboration among companies on sustainability. The latest example for these two comes from the apparel industry, where the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), a trade association representing more than a third of the global apparel and footwear market, unveiled the Higg Index, a new tool for sustainabihty measurement across the industry value chain. 

As the MEs may not to be competitive in producing functional products, most of the needs would be satisfied through imports. We call this the trade driven supply chain, shown in Fig. 7.2. For example in the apparel industry, products that are not fashion-sensitive are produced in the EE, usually in Asia, and imported in large volumes by retailers such as Wal-Mart. Manufacturers in EE obtain large production contracts with lead times of several months and therefore their exposure to demand side risk is negligible. However, they are exposed to a considerable supply side risk, discussed later. 

While the numbers in this example are specific to a particular line of dresses at one retailer, the problems highlighted in this example are symptomatic to this industry. Markdowns as a percentage of sales since World War II have increased from 3 to 16% for many segments of the apparel industry as described in Pashigan (1988). A Survey conducted by a major retailer which was reported in the New York Times on June 2, 1994 concluded that 50% of customers did not purchase products when they visited a store and of these 40% stated that they did so because they did not find what they specifically wanted. Similar over and under supply costs have been observed for products in other industries like automobiles (White, 1992) and personal computers (Hooper and Yamada, 1992 Stewart, 1992). 

Raw Materials. PVC is inherently a hard and brittle material and very sensitive to heat it thus must be modified with a variety of plasticizers, stabilizers, and other processing aids to form heat-stable flexible or semiflexible products or with lesser amounts of these processing aids for the manufacture of rigid products (see Vinyl polymers, vinyl chloride polymers). Plasticizer levels used to produce the desired softness and flexibihty in a finished product vary between 25 parts per hundred (pph) parts of PVC for flooring products to about 80—100 pph for apparel products (245). Numerous plasticizers (qv) are commercially available for PVC, although dioctyl phthalate (DOP) is by far the most widely used in industrial appHcations due to its excellent properties and low cost. For example, phosphates provide improved flame resistance, adipate esters enhance low temperature flexibihty, polymeric plasticizers such as glycol adipates and azelates improve the migration resistance, and phthalate esters provide compatibiUty and flexibihty (245). 

The 85 X 85 matrix in Table 4.4a contains a wealth of information useful to the chemical professional. Tables 4.6-4.8, which illustrate several important aspects of the sales patterns found in the United States, are typical examples. There is a wide variation among industries in the proportion of total output going to final demand. Some industries (e.g., construction [11 and 12], food and kindred products [14], apparel [18], furniture and fixtures [22 and 23]) sell most of their products directly to final demand. Other industries (e.g., nonmetallic minerals [9 and 10], lumber and wood products [20 and 21], metallic ores mining [5] metal containers [39]) sell practically all their output to intermediate consumers. The CPI and related industries fit mostly in the latter category (Table 4.6). 

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