Sustainability at Patagonia by Ejiro Ohwodo

Last week, the Sustainable Fashion Forum took place in Los Angeles. This was a one-day conference entirely dedicated to sustainable fashion and textile processes and practices hosted by my very own sustainability professor Ms. Andrea Kennedy. It was nice to still be able to watch the speakers behind my laptop in my living room. I listened to several speakers such as Mike Farid, and Carrie Freiman and Kathleen Talbot, but the presentation of Elissa Foster and Sarah Hayes stood out the most to me because of their transparency.

Elissa Foster and Sarah Hayes are both employees of Patagonia, a fashion brand founded in the 1960s that sells outdoor clothing. What sets it apart from other brands is that they are almost completely sustainable. Their mission statement “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”says it all.

The company was founded by Yvon Chouinard. He was a climber and he noticed that his equipment wasn’t working as good as he wanted it to, so he began making his own equipment. Soon he noticed his gear scarred rocks while climbing so he started to think about different ways to make his equipment without harming the environment. To this day, Patagonia is still privately owned by the Chouinard family which contributed to the fact that it stayed so close to its mission statement all these years. Patagonia has stores and offices in over 19 countries including Canada, Japan, South America and Europe. It’s known for using recycled material for making garments and it’s the apparel company with the most fair trade garments in the market at the moment.

Both Foster and Hayes were part of the Material Development and Innovations team; a team which main task is to identify and test all materials Patagonia uses to reduce its carbon footprint. They prefer to do this through innovation of their products and methods. Foster told the audience how they were involved in a project to lessen the carbon footprint. Looking at the whole company’s operations, they found that over 85% from the footprint came from the materials used by the company. Therefore, they examined the raw material processes and colouring to see what they could change. What was very important to them was to select from basic materials that are already known to be low impact such as organic cotton, to consider how fabrics were dyed and if that material made in a responsible way.

Another interesting fact that was mentioned was that Patagonia has been using only organic cotton since 1996. According to Foster and Hayes, the usage of organic cotton saves 91% water consumption and reduces 26% of soil erosion. Also, not harmful to farmers as there are almost no chemicals used in the process. However, I was surprised and quite shocked when they mentioned that still, only 1% of the total global cotton production is organic cotton. If it has so many benefits, why wouldn’t all companies switch to organic by now? I did some research myself and I found that it could be due to the fact that it’s more expensive to produce compared to regular cotton. Keeping the costs low is still one of the biggest drivers in businesses, so I can understand why it’s not appealing to make that change.

Patagonia also utilizes the method of solution dyeing “dope dyeing” to colour their yarn. For example to dye polyester with this method, plastic chips are melted into a sticky substance that people refer to as “dope”. A synthetic dye is added so it becomes solid colour. Lastly, it gets extruded in to filaments and becomes yarn. This decreases 96% of CO²emissions and 86% in water usage consumption. On the other hand, the colour fastness improves and the quality is higher because the yarn and fibres don’t go through heat processes when being dyed.

While all these are all great facts, I liked that Patagonia also thinks about how its business affects humans in the process such as using organic cotton which uses less chemicals that could impact the farmers’ health as was earlier mentioned in this post. The company also has a program where it pays premiums that go to funds. Workers in factories are allowed decide how those funds will be distributed by voting on a committee at the end of a season.

Currently, it also has voting campaigns to encourage its US employees to register and vote in the upcoming midterm elections.

When it comes to the customers, it offers a lifetime guarantee on all products. They have programs where customers can go to someone that repairs their gear and they offer opportunities for customers to resell old gear that is not being used anymore, so it doesn’t get thrown away.

Although Patagonia has been doing great work so far, I like that they were not afraid to talk about the challenges they are still facing. Foster and Hayes talked about how they changed a part of the business model because they found out that one of the farms where they used to get wool was drying out the land. This caused them to check every farm that produces their raw materials to verify all farms where they get their wool and down did not mistreat animals or harmed the Earth. As a result, they had to end working together with some of these businesses. However, this also caused them to come up with the Responsible Wool Standard, a set of rules to make sure the wool that is used is always sustainable and traceable.

At the end, Foster concluded the presentation by saying that the best thing about sustainability is that it’s none-competitive. It’s all about sharing knowledge, develop relationships, exchange ideas, inspire, working together and finding like-minded partners.

I think other business can learn a lot from Patagonia. They provided great, concrete examples of how things can be done differently. The way Patagonia does it might not work for everyone, but other could take certain elements and make it fit in their business model. I definitely think Foster and Hayes really lived up to the last part of Patagonia’s mission statement: to inspire and implement solutions.