If you supply fabric, garments, footwear or components to apparel brands and retailers, ESG questionnaires arrive constantly — and they lean on issues specific to your industry: chemicals, water, and labour conditions. This guide maps what textile and apparel buyers actually ask for, so you can prepare the right evidence instead of reacting to each request cold — textiles is one sector in our ESG-requirements-by-industry overview.
Why textile gets scrutinised harder
Apparel and textiles sit under more sustainability pressure than most sectors, for real reasons: wet processing uses a lot of water and chemistry, dyeing and finishing carry environmental risk, and the industry's labour history keeps social conditions firmly in scope. So a textile ESG questionnaire digs into areas a generic one skips — chemicals management, water and wastewater, and detailed labour practices.
You're not being singled out unfairly. Knowing where the emphasis falls just means you can prepare the evidence that actually matters here.
The requests you'll see most
Chemicals and restricted substances
This is the textile-specific heavyweight. Buyers ask about:
- Chemical inventory and management — what you use, how you store and handle it, safety data sheets.
- Restricted Substance Lists (RSLs / MRSLs) — compliance with the buyer's list or the industry-standard ZDHC MRSL of banned/limited substances in materials and production.
- Wastewater — treatment and discharge quality, especially for dye houses and finishing.
If you do any wet processing, expect chemicals questions to be the core of the assessment. Get your chemical inventory and SDS library in order first.
Water and environmental data
- Water use — intake and, where relevant, recycling.
- Energy and emissions — consumption and Scope 1 and 2 figures; brands increasingly ask for product- or facility-level carbon data.
- Waste — textile waste, offcuts, packaging, disposal routes.
If you haven't measured any of this yet, start simple: the free water calculator and carbon calculator give you honest first figures from meter readings and utility bills — enough to answer accurately while you build proper tracking.
Labour and social conditions
Given the industry's supply chain, social questions are detailed:
- Wages and working hours, overtime, fair remuneration.
- Health & safety — building safety, machine guarding, fire safety.
- No child or forced labour; recruitment practices (especially with migrant labour).
- Freedom of association and a working grievance mechanism.
Traceability
Brands increasingly ask where your materials come from — fibre origin, sub-supplier mapping, and chain-of-custody for certified materials (organic cotton, recycled content, etc.).
The platforms and tools behind the questions
Rather than a free-text questionnaire, textile buyers often route you through standardised tools:
- The Higg Index (now stewarded by Cascale, via the Worldly platform) — the FEM (environmental) and FSLM (social & labour) facility modules are the dominant self-assessment-plus-verification tools in apparel. If you've been asked for these specifically, see the Higg Index for suppliers.
- EcoVadis — general sustainability scoring, common among larger brands.
- SMETA / Sedex — social/ethical audits.
- amfori BSCI — social compliance, widely used by European retailers.
- Certification schemes — GOTS, OEKO-TEX, bluesign and similar, which buyers may ask you to hold or work toward.
The practical implication: you'll be asked the same underlying facts in several formats. Building your evidence once and reusing it is the only sane way through.
The evidence to assemble
- Chemical inventory + safety data sheets, and RSL/MRSL compliance documentation.
- Water and wastewater records — meter data, discharge/treatment evidence.
- Energy and emissions data — utility bills, a basic carbon footprint.
- Waste records — quantities, streams, disposal.
- Labour documentation — payroll, working-hour records, contracts, age verification, training logs.
- Health & safety — risk assessments, fire and building safety, incident log.
- Policies — environmental, health & safety, supplier code of conduct, human rights.
- Certificates and traceability — material certifications and sub-supplier information.
Use the assessment checklist to see which of these you're missing before the next questionnaire lands.
What not to do
- Don't guess chemical or water figures. In textiles these are checked closely; report what you can prove and flag what you're still measuring.
- Don't assume unknown means zero. If you've never measured wastewater quality, say so and start — don't invent a clean number.
- Don't ignore traceability requests. "We don't know where our fibre comes from" is increasingly a dealbreaker; start mapping sub-suppliers now.
- Don't answer each buyer from scratch. The facts repeat across Higg, EcoVadis, BSCI and direct questionnaires — reuse them.
The bottom line
Textile and apparel ESG questionnaires concentrate on chemicals, water, labour and traceability, and they usually arrive through standardised tools like the Higg modules, EcoVadis or BSCI. Build one evidence base covering those areas, keep it current, and let it answer every buyer — because in this industry, the same questions come back again and again.
Answer every brand's questionnaire from one evidence base.
ESG Passport organises your chemical, water, labour and environmental evidence in one place and maps it to the tools brands use — so Higg, EcoVadis and direct questionnaires draw on the same source.