"Suppliers don't care. Suppliers won't cooperate. Suppliers are a black box you have to drag, quarter by quarter, toward transparency."

Ask a brand why its supply chain data is thin, and you'll hear some version of the same story. We've heard this complaint for years. We no longer believe it.

In reality: transparency has been burdensome for suppliers for too long.
It’s costly. It’s confusing. It’s defined by bad UX and even worse UI.
Increasingly, early movers on the make side are stepping up to take the reins.

Baber Iftikhar is one of them. Baber cut his teeth in Nike's sourcing world, building their groundbreaking Dri-FIT technology in the early 90’s. Now, he’s turning the same attention toward the roughly 92 million tonnes of textile waste the industry produces every year.

Baber approached ABLE in early 2026 about developing real, sustainability numbers for his company, ColorSorts. Our first challenge: developing a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for the Cabin Core Flannel, made for the San Diego based performance and lifestyle apparel company prAna.

Here’s three things we learned from spending six months immersed in the world of Colorsorts with Baber, his partner Joseph Thomas, and innovation partners like Connoisseur Fashions, Sri Vinayaga and Maatrishakti Ecospin Pvt. Ltd.

Your panel that brings “everyone” to the table doesn’t bring everyone to the table. 

Hang around anyone of the conference ilk in sustainability lately, and you’ll hear a version of praise for panels in which, "everyone was at the table." Translation: one supplier, one brand, and one startup. Sure, that’s people getting together. But it isn't everyone.

The experience Baber and his team facilitated – calls with seven suppliers at a time, spanning tier 1 through tier 4, from fiber recyclers and spinners through weavers, dye and finishing houses, washers, and the final cut-and-sew factory — was a different situation entirely. Perspectives multiplied. Relationships got closer. And, I came out certain that real, effective transparency must be built supplier to supplier, if we’re ever to move apparel ahead in a meaningful way.  

When an innovator starts the story, the brand gets something richer. So does the consumer.

For prAna's flannel — a shirt built from a shell of 60% recycled cotton and 40% recycled polyester — Baber's goal was never simply to hand prAna a compliant or even more sustainable product. It was to build a pathway of education that runs all the way to the consumer, the way "organic" or "Fair Trade" became words a shopper could recognize on a hangtag without needing a chemistry degree to understand them. He wants mechanical recycling to become that kind of phrase.

That ambition runs into a problem most consumers never think about: recycling is not, by default, a clean business. Textile dyeing and finishing alone are estimated by the World Bank to account for somewhere around 20% of all industrial water pollution globally — a number that holds whether the fiber going into that dye bath is virgin or recycled. The word "recycled" describes what a fiber used to be. It says nothing about what happens to it on the way to becoming a shirt.

This is where the mechanical process ColorSorts uses drives wildly different results.

Cutting floor waste is sorted by color first, then shredded into fiber. Because the color-sorting happens before shredding, the fiber that comes out the other end is already the right color — which means the yarn spun from it needs no wet-dyeing step at all. The recycled polyester follows a similar logic: it's dope-dyed, colored while still molten, rather than dyed later as finished fabric. Skip the dye bath, and you skip most of the water and chemical load that makes textile production one of the dirtier industrial processes on the planet. Mechanical recycling, done this way, is engineered specifically to avoid the step that makes conventional production dirty in the first place.

That distinction — recycled versus recycled-and-engineered-to-skip-the-dye-bath — is exactly the kind of story a brand only begins to tell if an innovator like Baber is in the room to share it with them first. 

The most functional transparency conversations start with why, not what

Ask a brand sustainability lead what "cradle-to-gate" means, or why a functional unit matters, or what PEFCR alignment requires, and they'll answer fluently. Ask a washer or a dye house the same question, and you'll usually get silence — not because they don't understand their own process, but because nobody has translated the request into terms that connect to what they actually do every day.

When a supplier is asked to hand over utility bills, chemical recipes, and diesel receipts without being told why those specific documents matter for their own business, it reads as compliance, not cooperation.

For the seven suppliers behind the Cabin Core Flannel, Baber led a different kind of conversation. One that started with why, instead of what. He and Joseph walked each supplier through his vision, and the benefit of publicly sharing each suppliers’ role in more sustainable innovation. Then, they framed our work together as an opportunity for education. We were doing something new. We (all) should enter with a learners’ mindset. 

When someone pushed back on sharing evidence, we walked through why it mattered together. If someone didn’t have a specific set of data, we all went through the alternatives. Each week, at least one of us found ourselves repeating our informal mantra on every call - “we’re all learning together.” 

What ABLE delivered

Working alongside Baber and the seven suppliers who shared a full year of 2025 production data, we built three things for the Cabin Core project.

The first was a life cycle assessment: a cradle-to-gate footprint for the shirt itself, built to ISO 14040/14044 principles and PEFCR-aligned, independently verified by our science lead, Yazan Bdour, PhD. It combines primary evidence — metered utility bills, chemical recipes, SDS sheets, diesel receipts, and production volumes from every verified supplier — with ecoinvent industry-average data for the handful of raw-material inputs where direct metering wasn't available. 

The second was a visual transparency story for the garment itself, tracing the shirt stage by stage from Acqua Fiber's rPET recycling in Sundran, through spinning at Maatrishakti Ecospin in Gharaunda, to weaving, finishing, washing, and final assembly.

The third was a claims book — language prAna's marketing team can use with confidence, because every sentence in it maps back to a verified figure and a stated boundary.

Practicing what we're asking suppliers to practice — say only what's verified, and say it precisely — is the whole point.