Fashion Sustainability

Climate Change is Heating Up the Global Business World

We sat down with Kenneth Pucker, sustainability, fashion, and ESG (Environment, Sustainability, and Governance) expert and professor of the practice in the online Master of Global Business Administration (GBA) at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. We discussed how sustainability, ESG, and businesses’ bottom lines collide with the expanding global warming crisis.

Pucker is an accomplished writer, with articles appearing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Institutional Investor and the Harvard Business Review. Prior to his professorship at Tufts, he worked at Timberland, serving as chief operating officer from 2000 to 2007.

https://globalbusiness.tufts.edu/experience/resources/global-business-and-climate-change/

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Ultra-fast Fashion Rot Spreads to Amazon

Shein and competitors like Temu have grown so big that Amazon may be the only retailer that can compete with them.

And that’s exactly what it plans to do with a new discount marketplace that would allow the same suppliers who make goods for the ultra-fast fashion titans to sell their stuff through Amazon. Unbranded items would cost less than $20 each and ship directly to consumers from China in nine to eleven days, the thinking being that U.S. shoppers would wait longer than Amazon’s usual shipment speed for a lower price. The marketplace will focus on fashion, home, and other lifestyle items, and launch in the fall.

https://amyodell.substack.com/p/ultra-fast-fashion-rot-spreads-to

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Fashion’s Confounding Climate Math, Explained

Want to understand why it’s so hard to cut fashion’s planet-warming emissions? Or why consumers say they care about sustainability, but shop like they don’t? Stop thinking in straight lines, writes Kenneth P. Pucker.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/opinions/sustainability/fashion-sustainability-climate-decarbonisation-math/

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WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT SHEIN

Up until this point, there’s something we’ve avoided talking about almost entirely. Giving this thing extra air time, extra oxygen, felt counterintuitive to everything we stand for. Even if we were being critical – which we would be – we wouldn’t be telling people anything they didn’t already know; preaching to the converted just for clicks. And that’s not what we’re about.

That thing is SHEIN. And, try as we might, we can no longer avoid it; the fast fashion giant has inserted itself into the conversation, not by virtue of its planet-destroying practices, the ones we all know about, but by making claims at sustainability and circularity. By declaring itself a force for good. And let’s be clear: it is most certainly not that.

https://futurevvorld.com/fashion/shein-sustainability/

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Inside Shein’s plan to recycle ‘deadstock’ material into new clothing

Shein has many vocal critics such as Tufts’ Pucker, who say the company’s low prices and hyper-fast new product cycle encourage unsustainable consumption and resource use. “It’s not just that it’s more polyester, chemicals and microfibers, it’s the associated negative externalities that are unfunded and impact all of humanity.”

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/inside-sheins-plan-recycle-deadstock-material-new-clothing

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How to Grow a Fashion Brand Without Trashing the Planet

Over the last six years Puma has managed to double its revenue while shrinking its carbon footprint by almost a third. It’s an example more brands need to follow, argues Kenneth P. Pucker.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/opinions/sustainability/puma-emissions-growth-sustainable-fashion/?utm_source=newsletter_dailydigest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily_Digest_210524&utm_content=intro

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Conscious consuming: Sustainable fashion practices help slow climate change

Conscious consuming: Sustainable fashion practices help slow climate change

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The fashion industry primes us to reinvent ourselves every season. Don’t fall for it.

Pucker explained that the dangerous cycle of overproduction and overconsumption is coupled with complicated global supply chains that are hard to trace and make transparency tedious. And disclosure regulations are near non-existent.

He noted that when fashion companies release emissions reports, the majority of these reports include only Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, as characterized by the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Protocol. These emissions encompass activities like driving to work and purchasing electricity. They’re not reporting on the big stuff, which is everything else.

“(Companies) don’t want to do any of that,” Pucker said. “It costs money, it’s hard, it’s detailed, and the planet is burning.”

The fashion industry primes us to reinvent ourselves every season. Don’t fall for it.

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Why It’s So Hard to Track the Fashion Industry’s Emissions

A growing number of fashion companies are talking about substantially cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. But evaluating those efforts is tricky.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-05-16/is-your-favorite-fashion-brand-cutting-emissions-it-s-tricky?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxNTg2MzMxMSwiZXhwIjoxNzE2NDY4MTExLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTREtUQUtEV1gyUFMwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJFMkUzODg2QzgzREM0NTUxOEVFM0M2MDRGN0ZBRTlGMyJ9.B64jSM_CdVSN7A39q7ZLbDr9cAb74sWGex6lDznvwLQ&sref=fnjoKOAK

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Why Fashion Should Have a Plastics Tax

The fashion industry continues to advance voluntary and unlikely solutions to its plastic problem. Only higher prices will flip the script, writes Kenneth P. Pucker.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/opinions/sustainability/why-fashion-should-have-a-plastic-tax/?utm_source=newsletter_dailydigest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily_Digest_030524&utm_content=intro

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