Our mission
Sportscraft is an iconic Australian lifestyle brand with over 100 years of history, reflecting our beautiful country though considered style and design. We wish to protect the land we so cherish by reducing soil degradation, water use, and water pollution, whilst promoting regeneration through our practices.
How are we doing this?
Over the next five years, Sportscraft is making changes to our business to reduce our impact on the earth, through a range of land protection partnerships, reductions in water usage and pollution and increasing our usage of consciously created materials. Want to know more? Read on!
Land Protection
Soil is the foundation of agriculture. Over 85% of our garments primarily use a farmed material such as cotton, viscose, lyocell, and wool from grazing sheep. Along with protecting the soil, our goal is to work towards regeneration to ensure the soil can be used for thousands of years to come.
Regeneration is focused on renewing and restoring ecosystems, making them more resilient to natural fluctuations which in turn works to reduce the impacts of climate change. Regenerative agriculture can also help to draw down carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil.
Soil impacts don’t just come from growing crops and grazing animals either, soil can be impacted through water mismanagement and the chemicals used all the way through a supply chain. Mismanaged water can pollute waterways with chemicals which in turn damages and degrades soil quality.
What happens if soil isn’t managed correctly?
When the soil quality declines it becomes a serious environmental problem as soils are a fundamental natural resource. Most soil degradation in agriculture comes in the form of chemical soil contamination, soil compaction, or fertility decline. Once soil declines in quality too far, it becomes unusable for agricultural purposes and can be extremely difficult and costly to reverse.
Key Priorities
LAND PROTECTION PARTNERSHIPS
To drive impact throughout our production cycle, we will be partnering with our farmers to improve the techniques used in growing our raw materials. By 2025 we will have a Conscious Living range made from materials our land partnerships have created, with a requirement that they use soil regenerative practices.
WATER USAGE REDUCTION
We will be working closely with our printing, dyeing, and washing facilities to introduce or improve water saving techniques. These will reduce the overall water use across their business, including our Sportscraft garments, to ensure that we have a lower water impact. By 2025 we will reduce the water use in our printing, dyeing, and washing facilities by at least 10%.
WATER POLLUTION REDUCTION
Polluted water can carry chemicals into waterways, soil, and surrounding environments. To reduce chemical pollution in water and soil we will introduce chemical management systems into the printing, dyeing, and washing facilities we use most for our garments. By 2025, we will have a chemicals management system in at least 50% of our printing, dyeing, and washing facilities.
Land Protection Partnerships
To create our Conscious Living range, we’ll be partnering with suppliers at the farm level, then reengineering our supply chain to feed the raw materials through. Rather than going top-down in the manufacturing process we’re going to start at the source and ensure our raw materials are transparently growth with land protection practices in place.
Water Usage
You might be thinking ‘why only 10% for reducing our water footprint in printing, dyeing and washing?’. This may seem low, but there are three reasons why we’ve set it at this level:
1. For a large portion of our fabric mills, the printing, dyeing and washing facilities are a separate facility. So, while the fabric mill weaves or knits the fabric, they may have another facility that dyes the fabric – which means we have to meet the dyeing or printing facility, build a relationship, measure their water use, then work to reduce it.
2. However, many of the dyeing facilities we currently work with have already implemented water reduction systems into their business, so we are working to reduce the amount of water used on an already lowered level.
3. Many of the facilities we will partner with, will have already reduced the water use as much as they can without additional investment. After this, facilities need to invest in new machinery which reduces water use, we aim to increase our partnerships with these facilities to aid in this investment.
It’s not quite possible to completely remove all the water from the printing, dyeing and washing processes, yet – though when the technology catches up, we know one day it will be.
Water Pollution
Why are we aiming for only 50% of our facilities to have a chemicals management system in place? Like reducing water usage, there are investments required from each of the facilities in new processes and technologies, which take investment and time to implement.
This isn’t all we’re doing
This is not all we’re doing at Sportscraft, our land protection goals are all part of a much broader strategy which our parent company is undertaking. If you want to learn more about:
• Our human rights policies in Code of Conduct and Global Sourcing Principles
• How we ethically source across our supply chain
• Where we source from for our factory base
• Our Living Wage Policy
• Our Modern Slavery Statement
Please follow the link here to our corporate website to read further into the full ethical principles that build the entire foundations of our business.
