As part of a recurring series, Cascale details the involvement and vision of its Board members. Here, Lena Staafgard, Chief Operating Officer, Better Cotton, details the need for greater connectivity between Cascale members and fibers like cotton.
As part of a recurring series, Cascale details the involvement and vision of its Board members. Here, Lena Staafgard, Chief Operating Officer, Better Cotton, details the need for greater connectivity between Cascale members and fibers like cotton.
Lena Staafgard: Better Cotton has been a member for several years, and I have been on the board for two terms now, so coming up on three and a half years of engagement with the board.
L.S.: At Better Cotton, we work on system transformation, and we have a very clear focus on cotton as one of the most-used natural fibers in the world. What attracted me to Cascale was the even broader system transformation, and I felt, after a good 10 years at Better Cotton, I had a lot to share and contribute to Cascale’s journey of working effectively across many countries and many stakeholders and many interests to mobilize enthusiasm for deep change. For me, this was a super exciting opportunity, and I’m very pleased to have been elected.
L.S.: So system change requires a lot of goodwill and a lot of true commitment from all the players involved. I think it also requires a lot of patience, willingness to hear uncomfortable truths and be uncomfortable. It requires a lot of time and compromise, because you need to find the path forward that works for everyone. It’s not necessarily the top choice, especially if you would prefer your own needs and preferences, but it’s the path forward that works for everyone. I strongly believe only when everyone buys into the process and is willing to go down the route – that’s when you will see change happening.
L.S.: Well, I’m a traveler, so I’m lucky to have a job that takes me traveling. Growing up, I never actually thought I’d have a proper job. I felt I would just roam the world and do various odd jobs. Here I find myself many years later with a proper job creating real change. I still have my travel, so that’s lovely. I get a lot of energy from it and my family brings me a lot of joy as well. It comes down to traveling, connecting with others, gaining new experiences and new lessons, and learning new things and seeing things in a way that I may not have seen before. That’s really driving me, and I think I’m getting that both from Better Cotton and from Cascale.
L.S.: Just last week, I was in Benin in West Africa. It’s the first time I visited Benin. So that was the personal experience. But being there on World Cotton Day, we were celebrating the public good that cotton is – looking at how it not only provides fiber for our clothes and our bed linen and home textiles, but also livelihoods, income to people, and it, of course, has a very important role to play in climate change mitigation. Coming to Benin and seeing the enthusiasm from the top-level of government for cotton – as a critical commodity for the country and for the country’s well being – was amazing. I was very impressed by the organizers in Benin, and with representatives from governments all across West Africa and Central Africa and beyond. They also took me on a trip to visit an industrial park, so they’re investing quite heavily in making sure that cotton adds even more value to the Benin economy, and they’re building and investing in a massive industrial park to start manufacturing in Benin and create more value by creating new jobs. It was really state of the art. The facilities are super modern with all the health and safety protocols in place. It was clean, well air-conditioned, and overall impressive to see the commitment to the textile industry of the whole country.
Cascale: What has been the biggest challenge in staying the sustainability course?
L.S.: I find one of the biggest challenges is to push for scale. It can be very easy to get small projects, pilots, and demonstrations off the ground or to fund one model factory. But it’s a real challenge to say, “This needs to happen everywhere.” We need to have improvements across the board in factories and in working conditions. We need to see improvements across the board for all cotton production. That’s not cheap. It requires investment. I think within Better Cotton, as with Cascale, our members know that the cost of not acting is ultimately going to be higher than the cost of taking action. It’s still super difficult to get through the drama of the day, and the challenges of today to get proper investments for the long term benefit of the benefit of the industry.
L.S.: It’s been a perfect opportunity on LCAs with the Higg Material Sustainability Index (MSI) to actually pull together our resources. At Better Cotton, historically, we’ve not published LCAs. Better Cotton comes from so many different countries. It’s grown by smallholders, by large farms in India, Southern Africa, and the U.S., where the footprint would be very different because the environment is different. So we haven’t been able to find a good LCA methodology or a good LCA context that would tell a true story about Better Cotton. I’m super pleased that through the membership we have with Cascale that we’ve worked with your team and with other cotton standards to utilize the data available, the approaches available, and then make sure that we move together forward, and not one on one, not that we have different LCA for every cotton grown right, for conventional, organic, for Better Cotton, but that we align on the methodology and the data that we’re using, so that we all speak the same language. It’s also a great use of resources that we’re pooling together. Ultimately, I believe, by organizations such as ours working together, we make it easier for the whole industry to move forward on this transformation journey. I think that’s been a really rewarding and long process. Here we are, three years later, and we’re ready to make the updates to the Higg MSI and have a cotton module that we all align on.
L.S.: I think for Cascale, I’m really looking forward to working with Colin [Browne] and the whole team on some of the core principles for Cascale, and that’s the multi-stakeholder principles, ensuring that the affiliate members and the manufacturer members and the retailer and brand members come together on equal terms.
I think it’s only together that we can really come up with the great solutions that will work and that will have traction. I know in the past, there’s been some imbalances, and it’s challenging because we’re working in the industry where we have pre-established power relationships, and I think it’s on Cascale, and I can feel a real desire within the team to challenge that and make sure that we are moving forward on equal terms as partners on the journey. We’re on a similar track in Better Cotton, making sure that the farmer has a seat at the table, an equal voice, and an equal say in determining the route forward, as far as priorities and how we drum up the support and the investment to make things happen.
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