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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