Key Takeaways:
- New investigations and reporting released this week serves as a reminder of the seemingly-pervasive use of fossil fuels in fashion’s full-scope energy mix, and petroleum-derived fibres in the assortments of leading brands.
- Based on public commitments, many companies seem to either lack the data to substantiate renewable energy claims beyond scope 1, or that data exists and is not being disclosed.
- On top of the ongoing environmental impact, the lack of disclosure around fuels and synthetics spotlights a continued lack of visibility into both the footprint and the potential fragility of fashion’s upstream processes. A cautionary tale from the automotive sector shows just how far a single point of failure can scale to impact some, or all, of the product journey.
Every business aims for resilience. High fashion’s best-known houses pride themselves on having standards, brands, and levels of craft that have stood the test of time. And the mass market companies that have been the best able to adapt their supply chains and sourcing strategies to fast-changing externalities are also the ones that are lauded as being the most resilient.
The foil to any resilience strategy, of course, is a single point of failure, or any over-reliance on a particular region, partner, or input.
That context is important for a reading of Fashion Revolution’s What Fuels Fashion? Report, released this week. While that report doesn’t measure resilience directly, it exposes both the environmental impact of what it paints as fashion’s over-reliance on fossil fuels, and, in the process, reveals just how much of product creation and distribution hinges on the continued availability, market acceptance, and commodity cost of those inputs.
Focused on assessing public disclosure from major brands, the report aims to shine a light on the limitations of the scope of renewable energy targets, which often focus on brands’ own offices and facilities, but which ignore mill use, dyeing, and manufacturing – many of which could continue to run on scarce, depletive, environmentally damaging fuel mixes.
It’s important to note that it’s not clear whether those upstream suppliers do generate and consume non-renewable energy – and this is precisely the point that the investigation is geared towards raising. There is so much here that brands do not disclose, leaving regulators and consumers to fill the void with guesswork, which is not likely to be charitable towards the companies.
And even where Fashion Revolution identified brands that do make fuel-related disclosures that cover the extended scope of their product journeys, granularity is seemingly in short supply. A coal phase-out disclosure that conveniently leaves out purchased steam, for instance… even though steam is one of the most common heat sources in dyehouses and finishing lines.
Financing, the practical fiscal support factories would need to move away from fossil fuels, barely appears at all. Only six percent of brands mention the provision of capital support to their upstream partners to help with moving away from non-renewal energy. Just two percent mention help with operating costs for renewables.Which leaves suppliers footing the bill for any energy transition, without the long-term contracts or guarantees – despite the fact that the party realistically being held accountable by shoppers and investors is the brand itself.
The typical fibre mix of assortments ends up telling a similar story. Solidaridad, a global supply chain NGO active in over forty countries, just published a new Cotton Rankings, that aims to paint a more favourable picture of sustainable sourcing as a whole. But a rosy picture from some angles can break apart if you drill down into the composition of garments, where petroleum-derived synthetics continue to rule the roost.
The delta here can be hard to see, but it’s pronounced if you know where to look. According to the Solidaridad report, a major global athletic brand can commit to using 100% certified cotton – and can back that claim up – but the effect on its overall impact of that switch will be muted given that less than 15% of its overall material use is cotton, and more than 50% is synthetic. The same report also reminds us that fast fashion giants can talk a big game when it comes to investing in proximity sourcing for cut, make, and sew, but the devil’s in the details… and those details (at least according to this ranking) are more than 80% of materials used being wholly or partially synthetic.
Some of this discrepancy between how fashion talks about cotton (a fibre that’s ubiquitous, natural, and comparatively easy to trace) and how it talks about petrochemicals is purely down to the ease of traceability. But the materials represent only part of the picture.
What Fuels Fashion? finds that fabric processing is dominated by heat, around 70 to 80 percent for dyeing, washing, and finishing with heat in many hubs supplied by fossil-fired boilers. So dependence on fossil inputs sits on both sides of the upstream system: the fuel mix that directly drives the process, and the fibres that make up the product.
And while the climate impact of that reliance is the major point of issue here, anyone more analytically-minded (or who’s spent any time working in sourcing risk optimisation) will recognise a vulnerability when they see one. If fashion only makes it to market by the grace of the continued availability, cost predictability, and consumer acceptance of fossil fuels, then any significant change in those variables represents risk on a significant scale. This is not news, of course; companies track commodity oil prices just as often as they track the markets for cotton and other harvests, but when the circumstances that sit around those variables are as much in flux as they are today, and when we’re reminded of just how much reliance on fossil fuels fashion isn’t disclosing outwardly (or even to itself) then there’s a degree of fragility that’s going under-recognised.
This week, we’re also watching what those kinds of hidden dependencies, and the common links between different slices of the value chain, can do in another sector when outward unpredictability comes to visit. In September, Jaguar Land Rover (the automotive conglomerate that owns the two marques that make up its portmanteau, along with Range Rover and other lines) was hit by a cyberattack that disrupted its IT systems and led to a halt in production across plants in the UK, Slovakia, Austria and India. Hundreds of contractors along the supply chain have been impacted, and the financial ramifications are proving to be massive, with the government discussing aid packages even as we speak. One breach in one part of the system was enough to stop production around the world.
Fashion doesn’t face the exact same scenario (it doesn’t have the same part count as an automotive supply chain, for one) but the structural resemblance is there. The What Fuels Fashion? and Cotton Rankings reports are calling for disclosure, data made public so suppliers, regulators and watchdogs can hold brands to account. That accountability is being demanded at the environmental and humanitarian level, but it’s highly likely that investors and other stakeholders are assessing the same points of over-reliance on particular tools and inputs from a risk management perspective.
There is, though, movement in the other direction. On Tuesday, PlasticFree said its global materials database will become open access, with no subscription walls. The organisation is aiming to make thousands of validated materials, case studies, and points of analysis available to designers, brands, regulators, and even the AI systems now trawling material data.
Read next to the energy and fibre findings, that announcement frames the story at a more positive angle. When information is opened in a way others can use, risk becomes easier to identify, and collective action (whether it’s on the part of the brands, their stakeholders, or the people buying from them) becomes, at least in theory, more achievable than it would if reliance remains undocumented.
