Rab

How sustainable is Rab?

This scree­ning has been done by Fai­ri­fy on Novem­ber 6^th 2020

Rab is a Bri­tish outer­wear brand that was foun­ded in 1981. The brand doesn’t publish a sus­tai­na­bi­li­ty report, but it pro­vides infor­ma­tion on its web­site. Rab is cur­rent­ly not trans­pa­rent about car­bon emis­sions, doesn’t publish an over­view of its sup­pliers, and there’s no clear over­view of mate­rial use. On the other hand, its down is cer­ti­fied by
the Res­pon­sible Down Stan­dard, and it offers a life­time war­ran­ty for all its pro­ducts. The com­pa­ny is acti­ve­ly wor­king on making packa­ging more sus­tai­nable, redu­cing waste and increa­sing rene­wable ener­gy use.

Rab has been a mem­ber of the Fair Wear Foun­da­tion since 2020 but pro­duces in high-risk coun­tries in terms of labor abuse. It states that it takes this risk very serious, and that it doesn’t remove its busi­ness from these com­mu­ni­ties because that ​“would seve­re­ly impact the eco­no­mic via­bi­li­ty of the area and open the wor­kers up to exploi­ta­tion by orga­ni­za­tions with lower stan­dards and less regu­la­tion in place than our­selves”. Rab is proud to create jobs there and wants to increase wages and living condi­tions for the popu­la­tion. Besides that, the com­pa­ny states that all its fac­to­ries are regu­lar­ly audi­ted by a third par­ty, but since FWF hasn’t publi­shed a report yet, it’s not clear
whe­ther these stan­dards are maintained.