Ralph Lauren

How sustainable is Lauren Ralph Lauren?

This scree­ning has been done by Fai­rify on July 3^rd 2020

The Ralph Lau­ren Cor­po­ra­tion is a pre­mium Ame­ri­can fashion com­pany. It employs over 12,500 peo­ple world­wi­de and has sto­res all over the glo­be. The cor­po­ra­tion mainly owns fashion brands, but also has bars and cof­fee shops in big cities. Lau­ren Ralph Lau­ren is Ralph Lauren’s more acces­sibly pri­ced brand.

Ralph Lau­ren mea­su­red and published its car­bon foot­print recently for the first time. It accom­plished this through the adop­tion of the Higg Envi­ron­men­tal Modu­le, which currently allows them to further redu­ce car­bon emis­sions and moni­tor envi­ron­men­tal per­for­man­ce in its supply chain. The com­pany has hereby achie­ved its pre­vious tar­gets of mea­su­ring its foot­print that allows for the intro­duc­tion of reduc­tion tar­gets. The­se tar­gets are now set and inclu­de a Scien­ce Based Tar­get to redu­ce its emis­sions by 30% by 2030, 100% rene­wa­ble elec­tri­city by 2025 in its owned faci­li­ties and a 20% reduc­tion of total water usa­ge. Ralph Lau­ren also inclu­des a tar­get for 100% recy­cla­ble or sus­tai­na­ble pac­ka­ging by 2025 and com­ple­te eli­mi­na­tion of harm­ful che­mi­cals in its supply chain by that same year.

Ralph Lau­ren has set tar­gets for all its mate­rials and aims to have 100% sus­tai­nably sour­ced 2025. All of the­se tar­gets are ambi­tious and indi­ca­te that Ralph Lau­ren is pushing for chan­ge fast. But they also indi­ca­te that the company’s current ope­ra­tion is lar­gely unsus­tai­na­ble. This is par­ti­cu­larly obvious for its mate­rial sour­cing. Cot­ton amounts for 82.1% of its total mate­rial sour­cing and is currently merely 13% more sus­tai­nably sour­ced. Most other mate­rials the com­pany sour­ces, like pol­yes­ter, vis­co­se, leather, cash­me­re and wool, are currently sour­ced without cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, which is espe­cially worri­so­me for leather and wool sin­ce the­se are pro­ne to ani­mal cruelty.

To touch on the labor topic, the com­pany does audit a lar­ge part of its supply chain and sta­tes 77% of its fac­to­ries were audi­ted in 2019. It further spe­ci­fies that out of 466 audits, 333 were con­duc­ted by inde­pen­dent third par­ties, 48 were done by Ralph Lau­ren itself, and Bet­ter Work con­duc­ted 85 audits. Howe­ver, the com­pany doesn’t spe­cify who the third par­ties were, and it doesn’t have a mem­bership with a big inde­pen­dent audi­tor like the Ethi­cal Tra­ding Initia­ti­ve or the Fair Labor Asso­cia­tion. More trans­pa­rency is nee­ded on the topic.

The com­pany shows that it wants to chan­ge rapidly and its ambi­tious tar­gets show that it’s serious about it. But tar­gets are also just tar­gets and there’s some serious work to be done by the com­pany if it wants to achie­ve them.

Old Id: 199775<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>