Mountain Hardwear

How sustainable is Mountain Hardwear?

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.