FASHION: THE BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE OF FASHION

By Michael Beutler, Director of Sustainability Operations, Kering

Fashion is about choices that define who we are and how we look. Fashion is also about choice in terms of what a garment or accessory is made of, where the materials come from and how they are transformed into the clothes that we wear. Each of these choices consumes resources in various parts of the world, some are scarce resources, some are toxic, some can even be beneficial to the environment.

Understanding the consequences of choices we make in fashion is what the Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) helps us do.We need to develop the EP&L to help our business understand our impacts and reduce them. It takes the concept of natural capital and applies it to daily business actions.

The EP&L measures the resources consumed across the entire supply-chain such as water, and land, as well as the outputs such as water pollution, air pollution and waste. It then values the impact to say how much each is worth to society. This shifts the conversation to a language that business people understand, money.

Through the EP&L, we can discover key aspects about our business:

• Most of our impacts are in the raw materials that we source for our products, like leather, cotton, wool, gold for example and through EP&L, we can identify best practices to reduce their impact.
• We can identify best practices in farming, ranching and mining industries, and where the lowest impact sources of key materials are and encourage the scaling of these practices across these industries and our own.

• These include quantifying the benefits of our sustainability initiatives around raw materials sourcing including cashmere, wool, leather sourcing, ethical gold and organic cotton.

• We can identify areas for innovation and new processes such as chrome free tanning and new dying technologies.

• We can help other industries apply the same concepts.

The EP&L was open-source with the general business community to encourage natural capital accounting more broadly, and to help other companies in their own efforts to minimize the impact of their activities on the environment.