New Balance

How sustainable is New Balance?

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

New Balance is an Ame­ri­can foot- and sports­wear com­pa­ny. The brand is not trans­pa­rent about its ope­ra­tions. The infor­ma­tion that the com­pa­ny pro­vides, is most­ly out­da­ted and lacks rele­vant num­bers that can help us deter­mine if the com­pa­ny is making deci­sions for the better.

It’s not enough

The com­pa­ny publishes a brief sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty report and offers some infor­ma­tion on its web­site where it offers a peak into its sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty world. For example, it states that it is wor­king on redu­cing the ave­rage car­bon emis­sions per pair of shoes and that it has set a tar­get for this. Water and ener­gy use per pair are to be impro­ved as well. Howe­ver, the com­pa­ny also states that it has not tra­cked scope 3 emis­sions and that it is still wor­king on esta­bli­shing tra­cking and repor­ting sys­tems. Without pro­per tra­cking and repor­ting sys­tems in its sup­ply chain, this seems like a very hard thing to actual­ly do right. We have no insight into true car­bon emis­sions, water or ener­gy usage or any real reduc­tion targets.

Red flags about labor conditions and animals

These are logi­cal mis­sing pieces of the puzzles if New Balance has yet to start mea­su­ring. Never­the­less, the lack of trans­pa­ren­cy is notable in eve­ry part of the company’s repor­ting. The Ame­ri­can brand has a his­to­ry with pro­duc­tion in the Uni­ted States and the Uni­ted King­dom and while it doesn’t publish a sup­ply chain list on the Open Appa­rel Index, it doesn’t actual­ly offer us any insights into how big the per­cen­tage of local pro­duc­tion actual­ly is. Fur­ther­more, we gain no wis­dom about how the com­pa­ny is taking care of wor­kers in these fac­to­ries. Its code of conduct notes the most basic wor­king rights, but doesn’t include col­lec­tive bar­gai­ning, a very impor­tant prin­ciple. There are also no men­tions of third-par­ty audits. These are both major red flags in terms of labor rights. The com­pa­ny does ban a few ani­mal mate­rials, but doesn’t do near­ly enough to ensure ani­mal wel­fare. Sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty isn’t com­ple­te­ly off the agen­da, it’s pro­ba­bly on there and New Balance must be making some impro­ve­ments. Howe­ver, we cur­rent­ly have no infor­ma­tion about how the brand is doing envi­ron­men­tal­ly and we have no clue whe­ther it takes res­pon­si­bi­li­ty over ani­mal wel­fare and wor­kers’ rights in its sup­ply chain. If New Balance is tru­ly serious about posi­tive change, we need way more trans­pa­ren­cy than it cur­rent­ly provides.

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