• 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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  • The fizz firm fudging its footprint

    How can Keurig Dr Pepper report a 12% reduction in scope 3 emissions when they’ve actually increased by 14%? David Burrows reports.

    If more companies commit to measuring and reporting publicly on their sustainability performance, four things should happen. ESG performance should improve; more ‘sustainable’ companies should be rewarded; a link tying companies with better ESG records to better equity returns should emerge; and the measurements and reporting should become more rigorous. “Over time, this virtuous cycle would result in a more sustainable form of capitalism,” wrote professor Kenneth Pucker from Tufts University, Massachusetts, in an HBR paper in June 2021.

    The fizz firm fudging its footprint

     

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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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  • 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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  • Will Americans Ever Get Sick of Cheap Junk?

    By Amanda Mull
    An American flag drowning in cardboard boxes
    Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

    In all the years I’ve spent covering American consumerism, I’ve heard one type of question from readers far more than any other: This can’t go on forever, right?

    Maybe they’d learned what happens to the huge volume of online purchases that get returned, or saw one too many questionably sourced mascaras and sunscreens hawked on TikTok Shop, or realized that the newly minted e-commerce behemoth Temu is spending many millions of dollars to urge you, quite explicitly, to shop like a billionaire. Whatever the impetus, the people asking this question tend to regard the consumer landscape with a mix of exhaustion and incredulity. The ever-expanding American closet is already swollen with cheap clothes, and our junk drawers and spare rooms and storage units already overfloweth with everything else. Americans have so much excess stuff that much of it can’t even effectively be given away. Can we—the people who have bought so much already—really keep buying more, and at a hastening clip?

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/americans-peak-stuff-shopping-temu-shein/678224/?gift=mZJJfvLLK2-N-97mYsXvt5j5Hty0oatfqOoAPrpRKTM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

     

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  • Why H&M is turning away from polyester recycled from bottles

    H&M’s new deal to buy $600 million of “circular” polyester over seven years from Syre, a Swedish startup it co-founded, underlines one of fashion’s dirty secrets: Making new polyester from recycled bottles sounds environmentally friendly but, in reality, polyester is a huge source of pollution. And recycling bottles to make more polyester might be worse than the alternative — keeping the bottles in the beverage industry where they can be recycled.

    Now some fashion companies are moving toward circular, textile-to-textile solutions that cut recycled bottles from the process altogether.

    https://www.greenbiz.com/article/why-hm-turning-away-polyester-recycled-bottles?

     

     

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