New Look

New Look cur­rent­ly doesn’t report on its cli­mate impact. It ack­now­ledges that its sup­ply chain has a big envi­ron­men­tal impact and is adop­ting the avai­lable tools that can help to mea­sure and improve it. It joi­ned the Sus­tai­nable Appa­rel Coa­li­tion, and with it the Higg Index, to mea­sure and improve envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance in its faci­li­ties. In prac­tise, this means that sup­pliers are requi­red to upload water and ener­gy usage, was­te­wa­ter, air emis­sions, waste and che­mi­cals in the Higg Module, which gains the brand insight and allows them to adopt effi­cient mea­sures. While it’s great that New Look is making use of the avai­lable tools, cur­rent cli­mate action has been found wan­ting.

New Look recei­ved the Car­bon Neu­tral Gold stan­dard for off­set­ting all direct emis­sions through veri­fied schemes. But these are the emis­sions that are gene­ra­ted in scope 1 and 2, which are its owned faci­li­ties, like offices and stores. The sup­ply chain consti­tutes a big gap in its repor­ting and gene­rates the big­gest chunk of emis­sions. On top of that, the com­pa­ny also doesn’t offer signi­fi­cant infor­ma­tion about what mate­rials it uses for pro­duc­tion and its tar­gets indi­cate low per­cen­tages of more sus­tai­nable mate­rials being used. The Bri­tish brand also uses ani­mal mate­rials from uncer­ti­fied sources.

Although labor rights are impro­ving, they are wor­ri­some. The com­pa­ny has a Code of Conduct and is a mem­ber of the Ethi­cal Tra­ding Ini­tia­tive and ACT, but is not trans­pa­rent about the fre­quen­cy and results of its audits and there’s no data pro­vi­ded about what goes in in its fac­to­ries. New Look’s move towards more trans­pa­ren­cy by publi­shing its fac­to­ry list shows that the com­pa­ny pro­duces in a lot of high-risk coun­tries, where there’s a risk of labor abuse. This needs impro­ve­ment.

New Look’s repor­ting actual­ly looks pret­ty good at first glance. But due to its inhe­rent­ly bad busi­ness model of fast fashion and the fact that almost eve­ry­thing the com­pa­ny states on sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty revolves around tar­gets ins­tead of what’s being done today, New Look poses a threat to the envi­ron­ment, the people wor­king in its fac­to­ries and ani­mals. We sup­port the tar­gets whol­ly and hope the com­pa­ny will achieve them. But it’s far from enough at the moment.