Events

Shades of Green instrument – clarifying sustainability in textiles and fashion

Today, understanding and comparing the sustainability aspects of items is challenging: Shades of Green is an instrument that maps both the environmental and social aspects throughout a product’s lifecycle focusing on design, materials, production, support services and working conditions.
Shades of Green instrument
Photo by Anne Kinnunen (2021)
Shades of Green instrument
Turunen, L.L.M., & Halme, M. (2021). Communicating actionable sustainability information to consumers: The Shades of Green instrument for fashion. Journal of Cleaner Production, 297, 126605

The instrument aims to be an international and industry-wide tool for communicating sustainability to consumers in an actionable way.

The Shades of Green instrument structures the sustainability information of products in a simple yet comprehensive form. By offering transparent and comparable information, it aims to support consumers in making better decisions for the planet and people.

Shades of Green instrument
Photo by Anne Kinnunen (2021)

It maps both the environmental and social aspects throughout a product’s lifecycle focusing on design, materials, production, support services and working conditions, and has three levels, demonstrated as a staircase with different shades of green. To meet the instrument criteria, companies need to be well on the way to developing the sustainability of their products. Many of the fashion items of today do not qualify and remain outside of the instrument levels.

In the exhibition, clothing items from pioneering Finnish brands introduce different dimensions of the instrument with their stories. The instrument has been developed in the FINIX research project on sustainable textile systems by Postdoctoral Researcher Linda Turunen and Professor of Sustainability Management Minna Halme. The exhibition has been designed and produced by Salla Neuman, Joona Järvinen and Emma van Dormalen.

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For further information on the Shades of Green instrument, see the article by Turunen, L. L. M. and Halme, M. (2021) “Communicating actionable sustainability information to consumers: The Shades of Green instrument for fashion”, published in Journal of Cleaner Production.

Shades of Green is a FINIX project.

Our team

The event is a part of Helsinki Design Week’s official festival programme and Year of Research-Based Knowledge. Aalto University is one of the EU's New European Bauhaus partners. 

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