Sorel

How sustainable is Sorel?

This scree­ning has been done by Fai­ri­fy on March 22^nd 2020

The Cana­di­an out­door brand Sor­el has been pro­du­cing warm snow boots sin­ce 1962, when the brand was born out of the need for warm boots during the cold, sno­wy win­ters. Sor­el is part of the Colum­bia Sports­wear Com­pa­ny, which is an Ame­ri­can out­door com­pa­ny that also owns Colum­bia, Moun­tain Hard­wear and prAna.

Unfair outer­wear

We belie­ve that out­door brands car­ry an even grea­ter respon­si­bi­li­ty towards the out­doors. Most out­door brands seem to share this opi­ni­on with us. The­r­e­fo­re, it hurts a bit more when an out­door brand is not taking big envi­ron­men­tal action. Unfort­u­na­te­ly, this is the case with Colum­bia. The com­pa­ny is sim­ply not trans­pa­rent about its sup­p­ly chain and mate­ri­al usa­ge and has yet to set any sub­stan­ti­al cli­ma­te tar­gets. Its report­ing is main­ly incom­ple­te and does not include the rele­vant data we need to ful­ly under­stand how it is ope­ra­ting. Colum­bia does men­ti­on that it looks for sup­pli­ers who imple­ment ener­gy effi­ci­en­cy and car­bon emis­si­on reduc­tion initia­ti­ves and that it works tog­e­ther with the Higg Index to impro­ve its envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance. Even though it’s in pos­ses­si­on of envi­ron­men­tal data, such as ener­gy effi­ci­en­cy and car­bon emis­si­ons, the infor­ma­ti­on about the company’s per­for­mance is miss­ing in its reporting.

Not trans­pa­rent

The same goes for Columbia’s mate­ri­al ori­g­ins. The out­door brand is a Blue­sign part­ner and sources 50% of its mate­ri­als from blue­sign cer­ti­fied faci­li­ties, but we’re in the dark con­cer­ning the other half. We see that the com­pa­ny uses a lar­ge amount of poly­es­ter, which is deri­ved from oil and harmful to the envi­ron­ment, but we have no clue about what the actu­al per­cen­ta­ge is. Most com­pa­nies curr­ent­ly include tables with per­cen­ta­ges of mate­ri­als being used in their report­ing, and this pie­ce of the puz­zle is miss­ing at Colum­bia. Fur­ther infor­ma­ti­on about envi­ron­men­tal action is not real­ly pro­vi­ded eit­her. The only men­ti­on of rene­wa­ble ener­gy rela­tes to the head­quar­ters, whe­re the Ame­ri­can com­pa­ny uses a very small per­cen­ta­ge, and the­re have been expe­ri­ments with bet­ter pack­a­ging pro­jects, but they’re not real­ly nota­ble. Ship­ping in the US always hap­pens through the UPS Car­bon Neu­tral pro­gram and a list of pro­duc­tion faci­li­ties has been published.

Baby steps

In terms of workers’ rights, Colum­bia is a mem­ber of the Fair Labor Asso­cia­ti­on, which has an ela­bo­ra­te Code of Con­duct that gets audi­ted by third par­ties, so basic workers’ rights are being upheld. They could be impro­ved through an orga­ni­sa­ti­on like the Fair Wear Foun­da­ti­on to ensu­re the pay­ment of a living wage, but the­re are no men­ti­ons of this at the moment. Ani­mal mate­ri­als are some­what okay: the down is cer­ti­fied through the Respon­si­ble Down Stan­dard and sheep mule­sing is for­bidden, but the com­pa­ny does use uncer­ti­fied lea­ther. All in all, it’s just not enough.

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