Most Fashion Brands Don’t Know Enough About Their Carbon Footprints To Actually Shrink Them

Claiming to do something about climate change has become a trend in the clothing industry. There’s been a spate of fashion pacts, charters and carbon-neutral proclamations, and now we’re even starting to see brands claim to be “carbon negative.” So should we celebrate a bit or just chalk it all up to greenwashing? According to two new reports, these announcements should be looked at through a highly skeptical lens. Earlier this month Stand.Earth, an environmental advocacy group, ranked 45 major clothing brands, and found that only two brands — Levi’s and American Eagle Outfitters — are doing enough to curb emissions to keep us under 1.5 degrees of warming, which is the limit recommended by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And on Thursday, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) published its Green Supply Chain CITI ranking, which scores 80 global brands that manufacture in China based on their efforts to curb pollution and their emissions. What these rankings reveal is that few brands are doing anything to measure their carbon footprint, much less cut it back to an Earth-sparing size. Read more at Fashionista.