Burton Menswear London

How sustainable is Burton?

This screening has been done by Fairify on April 7^th 2020

Bur­ton is a Lon­don-based mens­wear brand. The brand is owned by Arca­dia Group, a Bri­tish mul­ti­na­tio­nal high street retai­ler. The infor­ma­tion Arca­dia Group pro­vides is not brand-spe­ci­fic, which makes it dif­fi­cult to look at its brands’ sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty indi­vi­dual­ly. The infor­ma­tion that the com­pa­ny does com­mu­ni­cate is pro­vi­ded on its web­site, but not in a gene­ral sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty report. This makes it har­der to find out how well it does as a com­pa­ny. Fur­ther­more, the infor­ma­tion that it does pro­vide can feel like a course in sta­tis­tics and often mis­re­pre­sents how the com­pa­ny is real­ly doing. For example, repor­ting on scope 3 emis­sions only includes busi­ness tra­vel, which is a drop in a bucket com­pa­red to real sup­ply chain emis­sions.

It’s unfor­tu­nate that the com­pa­ny is not trans­pa­rent and a lot of infor­ma­tion is mis­sing. That being said, it’s a big posi­tive that it publishes an ela­bo­rate list of fac­to­ries, mil­ls, tan­ne­ries and pro­ces­sors in its sup­ply chain. The inten­tions in Arca­dia Group’s Code of Conduct are great, but the com­pa­ny ope­rates in many high-risk coun­tries where there’s a sub­stan­tial risk of harm­ful wor­king condi­tions and the lack of pay­ment of a living wage, espe­cial­ly for migrant wor­kers. Without audit results from inde­pendent third par­ties in an acces­sible report, there is no proof of a tru­ly fair and sus­tai­nable pro­duc­tion process.