Indian apparel brand wins Oeko-Tex certification despite tobacco links
18/05/2012
Testing to make sure Wills Lifestyle’s knit and woven textile products are from substances that can be dangerous to human health was carried out by Hohenstein Institute. The tests checked the clothing for more than 300 substances, including lead, formaldehyde, carcinogenic dyestuffs, heavy metals, and pesticides.
Wills Lifestyle apparel and accessories are sold in 78 specialty stores in 37 cities across India.
On announcing the news, the International Oeko-Tex Association and the Hohenstein Institute both made complimentary statements about the work Wills Lifestyle has done to make its textile products safe for consumers and for textile workers. Dr Stefan Mecheels, director of the Hohenstein Institute, said: “When textile products are safe for consumers, the result is a safer supply chain that positively affects the people who manufacture those textile products and their many components.”
For his part, Dr Jean-Pierre Haug, general secretary of the International Oeko-Tex Association, said the brand’s parent company, ITC, was to be commended for “its exemplary work” in producing fashionable and safe textile products. He added: “Independent, third-party certifications like the Oeko-Tex Standard 100 are objective, reliable instruments that provide transparency and consistency.”
What Dr Haug failed to mention is that ITC originally stood for Imperial (later, Indian) Tobacco Company and the Wills name in India is heavily associated with smoking. Even ITC’s divisional chief executive for lifestyle retailing, Atul Chand, made no connection between the clothing brand and the tobacco company in the comments he made at the time of the announcement. Instead, he said: “Oeko-Tex certification is a reassurance that our brand meets the high human ecology standards our consumers deserve. In addition, we are contributing to a safer textile industry in our country.”
A safer textile sector is an admirable goal for Wills and for everyone in the global industry, but to talk in this case about “human ecology” without mentioning the clothing brand’s links to the tobacco industry seems to fall short of the transparency lauded by the International Oeko-Tex Association.
When sportstextiles.com asked the Hohenstein Institute for its comments on this question, a spokesperson told us that Oeko-Tex has a set of testing parameters that focus on looking for possible residues of harmful substances in textiles from the substances used in production, but that it has nothing do with smoking tobacco and the health questions related to that.
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