Sustainability, the impact of fashion is still very high. But commitment grows

The attention of those who care about the health of the planet is currently focused on Belém, in the Amazon rainforest, where the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, the COP30, is being held until 21 November: 50,000 delegates from all over the world are discussing the Earth's climate future, 33 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the historic Rio Agreements were signed, and 53 years after the Stockholm meeting, where the impact of human activities on the environment was addressed for the first time.

Optimism that it can be stopped, or contained, is less than it was then. We are just five years away from reaching the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations at 2030, and CO2 emissions continue to rise, albeit less rapidly than in the past. Immediately after the Rio meeting, Lvmh, today the world's largest luxury group, inaugurated its 'department for the environment', the first step in the fashion industry's journey towards sustainability, aware that it is among those with the greatest impact on the Earth's resources and well-being.

Thirty-three years on, having grown to become a $1.3 trillion global business, fashion is still the second most water-intensive industry and is responsible for 2-8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But for many players, though certainly not all, the commitment to improvement is genuine: on the very day of the opening of the Cop30, The Fashion Pact (an NGO that involves the CEOs of groups and companies in the sector, such as Chanel, Zegna, Moncler and Prada, to achieve zero emissions in fashion) presented a new project, the European Accelerator, to support the reduction of emissions by suppliers along the entire supply chain, starting with the Italian one, through a harmonisation of collected data, for a better understanding of them, but also access to finance to enable often small companies to face complex transitions, since the decarbonisation of the European fashion system, according to an estimate by Teha Group, may cost EUR 4.4 billion by 2030.

The road to zero impact is an ambitious one, but one fraught with uncertainties and obstacles even for 'native-sustainable' groups like Patagonia, which three years ago decided to give extractive capitalism a run for its money by changing its corporate structure in favour of planet Earth (see column on page). Its most recent sustainability report, the first since that revolutionary act, is significantly called 'Work in Progress', and in addition to listing the goals it has achieved (such as the total elimination of hazardous Pfas from products) it honestly admits those that are more difficult to achieve: for example, despite setting 2040 as the year of zero emissions, Patagonia in FY24-25 still emitted 178.711 cubic tonnes of CO2, and no matter how serious and relentless technological research is, the percentage of use of recycled synthetics is at 84%, when the target was 100%. Cases like that of Patagonia, which has been B Corp certified since 2011 and scores better year by year, are examples0 for the entire industry. In Italy, drawing up in-depth sustainability reports is for example Manteco, a textile company in the Prato district, which thanks to patents such as ReviWool in 2024 saved 80 thousand tonnes of CO2 equivalent (19% less than in 2023), over 14 cubic hectolitres of water (-18.95%) and 167.81 terajoules of energy (-22.72%). Remaining in the textile sector, in the most recent Footprint Report of Eurojersey, a company belonging to the Carvico group, through innovative air-conditioning and water recovery systems, managed to decrease energy consumption per unit of fabric produced by 11%. 'Companies and society can put an end to this apathy, to this fatal form of extractive capitalism that has brought us here,' wrote Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in the report's introduction, 'but we must take the first step.