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At Coats, we aim to ensure that the effluent that we discharge from our manufacturing facilities has minimal impact on the environment around our factories.

We are members of the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) programme which aims to eliminate hazardous chemicals from the global textile, leather and apparel & footwear supply chains and ensure that effluent is properly treated. The programme’s vision is to have ZDHC guidelines and tools become the accepted industry standard.

Launched by six leading brands in 2011, the ZDHC Programme has since grown to 30 signatory brands and 123 contributors from the chemical industry, textile manufacturing and testing and accreditation laboratories Coats has joined as a Contributor in the Textile and Footwear industry.

We have robust programmes in place to ensure we always comply with local legislation. Although local legal requirements are becoming more and more stringent, weare going further, by investing in new technology to ensure that all of our effluent will meet ZDHC Wastewater guidelines by 2022. Over the past five years, we have spent or have committed to spend over $20 million on new effluent treatment plants and technology Projects include a zero liquid discharge plant in one of our largest facilities in India.

We have also started a programme to automate and enhance the testing of wastewater from our manufacturing sites. The new system automatically measures the water quality and triggers an alarm if any of the key parameters gets close to, or above, the limits we have set. This enables us to monitor wastewater quality in real time and decide what action to take to continuously ensure our compliance with required standards. We have also been successfully trialling a system that automatically blocks effluent discharge if key parameters are breached. Our aim is to progressively install this system across our units.

ZDHC have their own Manufacturing RSL which we ensure is included within our own Coats MRSL. Our acceptable limits are often much lower than the ZDHC MRSL limits, to ensure that we are fully compliant with customer expectations.