As fashion’s sustainability claims come increasingly under the microscope, the greenwashing “challenge” is still possible, an industry expert insists.
“The only way to challenge greenwashing is to have information, to devote some time to that information and to have the drive to find out what that information is,” said Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution, at the launch of the advocacy. The group’s annual Fashion Transparency Index in London last month.
The seventh edition of the index, which ranked 250 of the world’s largest fashion brands and retailers based on public disclosure of human rights and environmental policies, practices and impacts, opens a window into what these businesses are up to to say about their supply- chain operations, she said.
Companies are rated out of a possible 250 points in a host of categories, including purchasing practices, decarbonisation targets and sustainable materials. This is then converted to a percentage point, the higher the better.
“Once you speak the language, you can understand the nuances,” de Castro said. “And in terms of greenwashing, that’s a really important tool to be able to decipher what brands are actually doing versus what they say they’re doing.”
There has been some progress in extracting information from firms that are more used to being tight-lipped than outspoken. When the first Fashion Transparency Index came out in 2016, only five brands out of 40 – just 12.5 percent – were prepared to reveal any information about their inner workings. Today, 121 of the 250, or 48 percent, are open for review, perhaps bolstered by growing calls from investors and policymakers in the United States and the European Union for more information.
With overall progress ultimately remaining “very slow,” however, the industry has a long way to go before it begins its addiction to secrecy, Fashion Revolution found. Brands and retailers achieved an average score of 24 percent, or just 1 percent higher than last year. Nearly a third of companies, or 81 out of 250, scored less than 10 percent. Of them, 17, including Elie Tahari, Fashion Nova, Jil Sander and Tom Ford came out with 0 percent. Only three brands, OVS, Kmart Australia and Target Australia, scored more than 70 per cent and none exceeded 80 per cent.
H&M, which is the subject of a class-action lawsuit over “false and misleading” environmental scorecards and advertising, dropped from second place to fourth with a score of 66 percent.
“I think we should consider the GDP of all those brands that don’t disclose information at all,” Liv Simpliciano, director of policy and research at Fashion Revolution, said at the same event.
For Simpliciano, the results show that most apparel suppliers have failed to meet what she calls “the bare minimum: being honest and forthright about business practices.” Even low-hanging fruit, such as publishing a Tier 1 supplier list, has been picked up by just 48 percent of the 250 companies, although 10 brands that were reviewed in last year’s index have done so for the first time, including Bally , Chloe. and Guess. And despite the growing urgency of the climate crisis, less than a third of brands and retailers disclosed decarbonisation targets covering their entire supply chain, not just Scopes 1 and 2.
Commitments versus results
Another problem, Simpliciano said, is that brands and retailers are disclosing more information about their policies and commitments than about their results and impacts. While 28 percent of companies were open about the circular solutions they were developing, only 15 percent disclosed their annual production volumes and only 8 percent shared their post-production waste volumes.
“Brands absolutely know how much they’re producing, because no business is sustainable if they have no idea what they’re producing,” she said. “It is clear that they are choosing not to disclose this information, which really obscures the impact of overproduction and overconsumption. For brands to continue to be non-transparent about their production volumes signals that they may be more interested in profiting from the problem than actually addressing it.”
While pigging, she noted, seems to be a “scary word” for the industry, it is “absolutely” necessary. “We cannot reasonably meet our carbon reduction targets, which by the way are not very large, by 2050,” Simpliciano said. “We are in a climate crisis as it is. We have been issued a code red warning.”
The other numbers are just as dismal. Only 11 percent of brands and retailers publish their supplier’s wastewater testing results, “despite the textile industry being a major contributor to water pollution,” the index said. Only 24 percent of them disclose how they minimize the impacts of microfibers, and a slightly higher 32 percent publish their Manufacturing Restricted Substances Lists.
In terms of purchasing codes of conduct, only 12 percent indicate how their purchasing practices may affect garment suppliers and workers. Expanding on this, the vast majority of companies reviewed – or 94 percent – do not disclose the number of employees in their supply chains who collect recruitment fees, presenting a “blurred picture of the risks of forced labour”. Equally striking, only 13 percent of firms disclose how many of their supplier facilities are unionized.
What’s interesting, said Maeve Galvin, the Fashion Revolution project manager for the European Citizens’ Initiative to Demand a Living Wage for Garment Workers, as well as its director of global policy campaigns, is that 84 percent of brands and retailers retailers publish a policy outlining their commitment to freedom of association, the right to organize and collective bargaining at the supply chain level.
“This speaks to what Liv talked about earlier, which are well-formulated and very direct commitments that are disclosed but not supported by impact and progress data,” Galvin said. “So the difference between the 84 percent who make high-level commitments and the 13 percent who have discovered what impact on the ground looks like is pretty stark. And this relates to what we know – that the environment for organizing collective bargaining is extremely difficult in some countries and impossible in others.
When workers are unable to join unions, they are unable to advocate for better working conditions and higher wages, she said. “Garment manufacturing countries are really some of the worst places in the world for unions, frankly,” Galvin added. “And this is not a coincidence. It is associated with sourcing strategies and a business model that strives for low prices through a cheap labor mechanism. So again, what we really need here is honesty, so that brands’ stated commitments to freedom of association and collective bargaining are out of sync with what’s happening on the ground.”
Making unfounded claims
This discrepancy can be seen in another area that regulators have seized on as a hot spot for greenwashing. The Norwegian Consumer Authority, for example, recently took issue with Norrøna’s use of data from the Higg Material Sustainability Index to claim that its organic cotton T-shirts were better than conventional alternatives. Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority warned Asos, Boohoo and George at Asda last week that it will investigate whether their green claims really hold water. (The Fashion Transparency Index gave them scores of 51 percent, 27 percent, and 28 percent, respectively.)
According to Fashion Revolution’s calculations, although nearly half of brands and retailers (46 percent) publish sustainable material targets, only 37 percent provide information on what constitutes a sustainable material.
“Frankly, brands shouldn’t be allowed to make claims about sustainable materials without finding out what they mean by that and backing it up with information,” said Ciara Barry, policy and research co-ordinator at Fashion Revolution. “This is the environment we are in where green cleaning is rampant. And we all know that without scrutiny, green cleaning really thrives, which is why we can’t have unfounded claims from brands.”
Transparency, points out Fashion Revolution, should not be confused with sustainability. Even if a brand or retailer scores high on the index, that doesn’t mean it’s doing better socially or environmentally.
“Transparency is only a first step, but it is an important step,” de Castro said. “And it’s a first step that’s being accepted further and further as something that we all need to counter an industry that is impenetrable, dark, and has deliberately designed itself to be that way.”
“We can’t fix what we can’t see,” she added. “Holding brands accountable and keeping the industry controlled and controlled is the first step toward understanding what they’re saying.”
