These fashion brands fail at emissions disclosures, industry watchdog finds

The fashion industry is notoriously secretive about its new designs. Apparel giants appear to be following the same playbook when it comes to cutting emissions across their operations and supply chains.

While emissions are rising among 17 percent of the industry’s largest brands, many are not disclosing how they’re tackling the problem, according to a report released Aug. 1 by industry watchdog Fashion Revolution. The “What Fuels Fashion” report scored 250 of the largest apparel brands and retailers on how much they reveal.

• At the top of the rankings, among 13 brands with a 49 percent or higher rating, Puma scored 75 percent and Gucci 74 percent. Following them were H&M (61 percent), Champion and Hanes (tied at 58 percent). 
• The bottom of the heap found 32 brands, including household names Aeropostale, BCBGMaxAzria, DKNY, Forever 21, Nine West, Reebok, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tom Ford and Tory Burch.
• The average score was only 18 percent. 

“Climate breakdown is avoidable because we have the solution — and big fashion can certainly afford it,” said Maeve Galvin, global policy and campaigns director at Fashion Revolution. 

She urged companies to invest 2 percent of yearly revenues into decarbonization work and support workers, to “simultaneously curb the impacts of the climate crisis and reduce poverty and inequality within their supply chains.”

However, the industry is tight-lipped on some of the most basic data points, indicating a reticence to change and jeopardizing progress against the climate crisis, according to Fashion Revolution. For example, close to one-quarter of the corporations studied share nothing about their overall efforts to decarbonize.

The study found that roughly nine in 10 businesses fail to:

• Disclose exact numbers of the garments they make each year.
• Share any efforts to reduce supply chain emissions.
• Detail the types of energy suppliers use.

Only 6 percent of companies disclose their supply chain decarbonization investments, most of which they funnel to collaborative groups such as the Future Supplier Initiative or the Fashion Climate Fund, Fashion Revolution found.

In addition, 45 percent fail to explain the material emissions from producing their apparel. 

“Instead of investing in a fair transition away from fossil fuels like coal to renewable energy sources like wind and solar to power fashion’s supply chain in a clean way, fashion brands are shifting the costs onto the factories they work with; burdening workers and communities with fixing a problem they didn’t create,” the report said.

“While 58 percent of brands disclose sustainable material targets, only 11 percent reveal their supply chain’s energy sources, meaning ‘sustainable’ clothes might still be made in factories powered by fossil fuels,” the authors wrote.

One exception of a company expressing assistance for supplier partners to wean from coal or natural gas: H&M on June 19 announced an investment in brick battery company Rondo Energy.

Fashion Revolution scored companies according to 70 data points on “accountability, decarbonisation, energy procurement, financing decarbonisation, just transition and advocacy.” This report is an extended version of Fashion Revolution’s annual Fashion Transparency Index.

The nonprofit’s findings echo longstanding complaints by apparel industry observers. Among recent scrutiny, Bloomberg Green found in May that shifts in how companies report data to the CDP results in apples-to-oranges estimations of changes from year to year. Bloomberg’s reporters scrutinized companies to failing disclose more on climate, and more consistently. 

Wrongs and human rights

Active in 75 countries, Fashion Revolution was founded in response to the Rana Plaza factory that collapsed in 2013, killing 1,134 people in Bangladesh. The NGO often calls out the fashion industry’s human rights violations as well as “waste colonialism, overproduction and overconsumption.”

Only seven brands, 3 percent of the total, explain how they will help workers disrupted by extreme climate events, the organization’s report found. Yet the climate crisis may eliminate 1 million apparel-related jobs by 2030, according to Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.