If fashion had a word cloud in 2018, sustainability would have been large and at the center. Now it’s being piled upon by words like costs and tariffs and Trump, whose prominence is forcing sustainability’s presence to recede.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, remember those?) might have been a key catalyst for targeting 2030 as The Big Year by which to get fashion cleaned up, but a rising acknowledgment of apparel’s adverse impact, as well as an awakened consumer less comfortable with rivers running indigo and sewers a step from starving, were also key to sustainability’s increased relevance. One by one, fashion brands—whether called or compelled—started promising what they’d do to shrink their carbon footprints. Then, efforts to put regulations in place to secure some accountability for those commitments started ramping up, too.
In recent years, however, talk of sustainability has slowed in fashion and some believe the current realities may prompt companies to dial back their investments.
“Right now, it’s about the quarterly sales and profits and, unless that fact changes, I don’t understand how companies won’t [dial efforts back],” said Tricia Carey, industry veteran and chief commercial officer of Avalo Inc, a crop evolution company using AI to make crops, including cotton, more sustainable. “You’re always going to have the Patagonias, the Eileen Fishers, the SMEs that stay true to their core vision, but I think some of the global brands will look at reprioritizing sustainability, certainly.”
This Earth Day, which was noticeably quieter when it came to brands bragging about sustainability, was emblematic of this trend. Of the impact reports that were released, many touted longer-lead commitments, like Coach pledging to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, or more attainable goals, like Reformation committing to sourcing only recycled polyester by the end of this year. Inditex became something of an outlier by setting new sustainability targets, including to reduce emissions by more than 50 percent, and “protecting, restoring and regenerating” biodiversity across 5 million hectares, both by 2030.
Still, many companies seem to either be saying more than they’re doing, or saying little and doing less.
When Stand.earth released its Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecard last year, looking at 11 of the leading fashion brands and their performance toward a promised phase out of fossil fuels by 2030, it found that companies scored less than 25 out of 100 possible points, demonstrating “a significant lack of progress toward decarbonization.” “Only Levi’s, Puma and H&M are on track to reduce emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030 compared to 2018 levels,” the report noted. Shein, for example, scored a 2.5 out of 100. “The good news is that progress is happening,” Rachel Kitchin, Stand.earth senior corporate climate campaigner and the report’s lead author, said at the time. “The bad news is that that progress is being undermined by dangerous pollution from ultra-fast fashion, and the growing threat of greenwashing. Simply put, most brands are not yet on track to decarbonize and many are heading in the wrong direction.”
Investors, of course, have sniffed out the shift and are doing their own reprioritizing. Interest in ESG has notably declined thanks to regulatory uncertainties and politics, particularly an American administration that isn’t exactly singing sustainability’s praises. A Stanford survey of American retail investors released in January found that in 2024, “a mere 11 percent” of young investors felt it was important for their firms to influence environmental priorities, compared to 44 percent who thought so in 2022.
“I don’t think ESG is going away. But the extent to which the investment sector will drive it is likely to continue to decline significantly,” said Amit Seru, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), who was part of the research team conducting the survey. As to why, Brian Tayan, a researcher for Stanford’s Corporate Governance Research Initiative, said, “It might be the case that those groups who previously were most in favor are starting to sour on the cost of ESG either because they do not think the hoped-for changes will materialize or that the costs of achieving societal change through business activities are going to be too high relative to the results.”
“You’re always going to have the Patagonias, the Eileen Fishers, the SMEs that stay true to their core vision, but I think some of the global brands will look at reprioritizing sustainability, certainly.”
—Tricia Carey, Avalo Inc
The Slowed Crawl and the Bright Spots
Chatter has often outweighed action when it comes to sustainability, but Europe was always a brighter spot in leading the change, particularly from a regulatory standpoint. But even there, progress has somewhat slowed.
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which was formally adopted in July 2024, is probably the European Union’s most significant regulatory development with implications for apparel. It does things like require companies (EU-owned with more than 1,000 employees and 450 million euro global turnover, and non-EU companies with more than 450 million euro net turnover in the EU) to mitigate adverse human rights and environmental impacts from their value chains, including aligning business strategies with the Paris Agreement’s goals and setting clear climate targets. But political pushback has delayed progress and prompted modifications that could lessen the directive’s ultimate impact. In February, the European Commission said it would push the compliance date out by one year to 2028, and limit due diligence requirements to companies’ own operations and those of their tier 1 suppliers only. It would also only require companies to assess the effectiveness of their due diligence efforts every five years instead of yearly.
In the U.S., things might have looked different with a Kamala Harris win since the candidate and her camp had promised environmental commitments, but the Trump Administration has taken to rolling back climate initiatives in favor of developing fossil fuels. The president’s stance on climate change and environmental efforts makes federal sustainability legislation quite unlikely. On inauguration day itself, Trump signed an executive order to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, again. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted to end defense of its climate disclosure rule requiring public companies to assess climate-related risks and report their greenhouse gas emissions. It cited opposition and called the measure “costly and unnecessarily intrusive.” While the March move doesn’t entirely end the rules, it’s quite likely it will thwart them. At the state level, New York and Illinois are still pushing bills for corporate emissions reporting and climate accountability.
One potentially forward move for sustainability stateside is the Voluntary Sustainable Apparel Labeling Act, which was reintroduced in Congress in February. The proposed bill would let apparel makers and sellers have their goods reviewed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and, if approved, get a verified sustainability label to display on their products. But that’s not much. It’s not required and it provides no push to improve practices.
With enough C-Suite leaders supporting the current Administration or, at the very least, avoiding any feather ruffling to keep things favorable for themselves, many American companies will be quieter on the eco-friendly front and may even tamp down any new efforts.
The short version of this saga is: 2030 is looking less and less likely to be a year marking sweeping change for sustainable fashion.
“The truth is, the consumer goods industry is not yet doing enough to address the climate crisis,” said Cascale chief executive officer Colin Browne. “There are two areas where we see the greatest challenges. First, many brands still take a fragmented approach to decarbonization. Some push the responsibility onto their supply chains without providing enough support. That model is not sustainable…Second, audit fatigue is a major issue. One manufacturer recently told me they underwent 723 audits in a single year. That is a massive drain on time and resources. The bright spot is that more organizations now understand that sustainability is not a side topic. It is central to supply chain resilience, reputation and regulatory readiness.”
Cascale—formerly the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, best known for creating and managing the Higg Index suite of tools to measure environmental and social impact—has set a clear climate target for 2030; a 45 percent industry-wide reduction in emissions. To meet it, however, Browne said “we need bolder and faster action.”
“We are focused on ensuring efforts are targeted where they can make the most impact. Our analysis of 2023 Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) data shows that 1,800 manufacturing facilities across nine countries account for 80 percent of the sector’s carbon emissions. This insight allows us to prioritize high-impact, scalable solutions. This won’t be easy, but the urgency is clear, and so is the business case,” he said. “One area where we can act quickly is renewable energy. In Vietnam, for example, our data shows that less than 2 percent of the sector’s energy comes from renewables. That number must grow significantly if we are serious about transformation.”
In its own effort to advance some of the necessary transformation that would lessen fashion’s overall impact, Avalo is tapping into timely technology—its own version of ChatGPT.
Just like you prompt your ChatGPT, Carey explained, the company can prompt its AI by saying, “‘Given these conditions of soil, climate and the fact that we want to reduce the cost of fertilizer by this much and not have water irrigation, what traits do we need to have?’ And they’re able to go all the way back to seed banks to develop the right traits for the seeds,” she said. It’s done using bees for cross breeding and leaving out GMOs. “It’s all new technology. When you think of everything that AI is going to do to change the way we can rapidly evolve within society, this is one of them. And with climate change, we know that crops need to adapt at a much faster pace. They’re able to cut the time in half for crop development.”
Bright spots may be fewer and further between but they do remain, as most companies know there’s no going back to 10 years ago when turning a blind eye to impact was common and fashion’s pollution was rampant and largely unchecked.
“The bright spot is that more organizations now understand that sustainability is not a side topic. It is central to supply chain resilience, reputation and regulatory readiness.”
—Colin Browne, Cascale
From the Factory
On the manufacturing side, Muhammad Ayaz—an assistant professor at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Pakistan and a research fellow at Harvard University’s Mittal Institute where he’s focused on the impact of globalization on production in developing countries—knows five more years isn’t enough to get fashion to where it wanted to be by 2030.
“We all know that we are short of meeting those goals because the kind of investments needed, the kind of actions needed, it has not happened,” he said. “There was, of course, a push, a momentum which had been created, and as we were moving towards 2030 we were expecting this momentum to increase. But the way things shaped out recently, it has slowed things down a bit.”
The consolidation of the manufacturing base, particularly in Pakistan where Ayaz is from, means a handful of suppliers are doing the bulk of the work, he said, and the bright spot there is that for those that had already made investments in things like alternate fuels, solar and waterless technologies, they’re not just going to halt use and progress. “A little slowdown might happen, but we don’t see a complete reversal of whatever has been done so far,” Ayaz said.
Still, with working capital in short supply, Ayaz seconded Browne’s statement that brands can’t continue to simply dump sustainability progress or advancements on the shoulders of their suppliers. He has seen some wins, though, with buyer-supplier co-investing or advance financing from brands that “care more about sustainability.”
“In certain cases, we’ve seen that certain brands were able to give suppliers some extra support so they can implement a living wage at their facility, for example,” Ayaz said. “So the brand was saying, ‘OK, this percent of the FOB value I’m going to give you but you have to make sure you invest in providing better wages,’ This is something which can happen but it requires a whole, multi-layered kind of awareness.”
“Everything this year, since January 20 is factored through the filter of tariffs and uncertainty.”
—Julia K. Hughes, USFIA
But, tariffs
The four-letter-word in fashion right now is tariffs, and whatever awareness or compassion brands may be keen to have, their bottom lines may not afford.
From Washington, everything’s coming up tariffs.
“Everything this year, since January 20 is factored through the filter of tariffs and uncertainty,” said Julia K. Hughes, president of the United States Fashion Industry Association (USFIA). “Most of the brands and retailers that I’m hearing from, everyone is still kind of in a pause mode, they’re putting off decisions.
“I haven’t heard anyone say, ‘Oh, we’re shifting resources away from sustainability,’ but sustainability isn’t top of mind for most in the C-Suite,” she continued. “I don’t think people have moved away from it but the question is: could they meet their goals even with full commitment?”
By the looks of things, maybe not. But Browne, at least, believes fashion will adapt despite the tariffs.
“Our message to the industry is simple: stay committed to sustainability,” he said. For Cascale’s part, the organization is now requiring all of its corporate members to set either science-based or science-aligned targets. “By the end of 2023, nearly 60 percent of our members had set or begun working toward these targets. That is a 29 percent increase from the year before. Our goal is to reach 80 percent.”
Asked to choose one area for fashion to double down on in the next 12 months, Browne didn’t hesitate to say sustainability—not as a separate initiative but as a core part of business strategy, he added.
“The cost of inaction is rising. Trade uncertainty, tariffs, regulatory demands and consumer expectations are all intensifying…But we need less fragmentation and more collaboration. That means aligning around proven solutions, focusing on shared data and listening to the needs of manufacturers on the ground.
“The opportunity to lead is here,” he continued. “Companies that act now will shape the future of this industry.”
