Extending clothing life protocol

Overview

The Extending Clothing Life Protocol has been developed as part of the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP). It is intended to support companies wishing to develop and supply garments designed and manufactured for a longer life, and offers a template of good practice in increasing clothing life.

The benefit to companies is that a minimum standard of good practice can be embedded across the product range, complementing specific design innovations such as anti-fading and anti-pilling technologies (as may be used in premium-priced products) and reinforcing brand value by:

• Providing a means of quality assurance, so that all garments meet an acceptable standard, hence protecting brand reputation for quality and value for money.
• Providing a structured approach for development teams to ensure that good practice is achieved for all garments, minimising the threat of suffering the cost of discovering poor quality at a later stage.
• Enabling the development team to screen out those short-term failures which lead to higher rates of customer return (such as trims) and to ensure appropriate levels of performance on attributes associated with longer-term failure modes and customer perceptions of poor quality (such as fading and pilling).
• Providing practical or workable regimes for garment testing that build the knowledge and experience to predict, identify and avoid sub-standard performance and avoid premature failure.

To aid access of the protocol, WRAP has developed a “How to” guide in a simple, interactive PDF format, to assist those who have trouble understanding some aspects of the protocol, or need a simple way to explain the protocol to their teams.

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