Four years ago, the British Fashion Council (BFC) secured government funding for an ambitious sustainability project: helping the small businesses that make up the bulk of the British fashion industry tackle decarbonization.
It’s one of fashion’s most urgent — and complicated — challenges, but most of the 75 London-based brands taking part did so without a dedicated sustainability team. The goal was to help even the most time-poor, cash-strapped businesses measure their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and develop credible plans to reduce them, says Shailja Dubé, deputy director of the BFC’s Institute of Positive Fashion (IPF).
“The businesses we worked with range from having one person to 10, so they cover micro-enterprises as well as SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises],” she explains. “We set up the program to support that scale, where there are very few people on the team and they need to run the business as well as learning all of this and tackling the literal burning issue of climate change.” For many of the businesses involved, this was the first time they had calculated their carbon footprint. On average, the Low Carbon Transition (LCT) program will help them deliver a 25% reduction in emissions by 2030, Dubé adds.
To mark the end of the program, the IPF has published “The Low Carbon Transition Guide”. It was designed as a practical toolkit to scale the learnings. Mirroring the program, it walks brands through the basics of fashion’s impact on the climate, material choice as the biggest emissions lever, how to work with suppliers, reducing shipping emissions, lower impact events and marketing, how to comply with regulations and reporting requirements, circular business models, and communications.
This is a more holistic approach to decarbonization, says Dubé, noting that larger brands might focus more specifically on supply chain emissions, electrification and renewable energy, while small brands tend to have less oversight of this part of the supply chain. “People can be very purist about decarbonization, but we can’t approach this in one dimension,” she says. “The goal was to raise awareness and help creative directors understand where their carbon hotspots were, and how different business decisions could address those hotspots — some of which was quite low-hanging fruit.”
Where larger brands might co-fund decarbonization with their suppliers, use AI to identify decarbonization opportunities, or help next-gen material innovators reach commercial scale, SMEs rarely have the resources to make such sweeping investments, says Dubé. “Take the transition to low-impact materials — that is hindered by minimum order quantities, which affect SMEs considerably. There are infrastructure gaps and investment inertia. At the same time, SMEs have more agility than their larger counterparts, so they can adopt new practices faster.”
Here, six creative directors share their key learnings from the decarbonization program, and the most transformative changes they made in the process.
Patrick McDowell
Founder and creative director, Patrick McDowell
The best part of the project was allowing us to understand the bigger picture, which gave us the tools to understand where we were and how we could adjust. It was really interesting to understand our impact as a whole, but also as individual garments.
Understanding that the main impact of a garment is through its materials, we were able to see clearly how fabrics add to the carbon emissions of the garment. We realized that silk has a much higher impact than other fabrics we use. I personally didn’t realize how some natural fibers fared in terms of carbon emissions, which brought up issues around reporting needing to be more nuanced and holistic, but we diversified our material pool after this. Now, we include lower impact materials like cotton and viscose, too.
