Uniqlo

How sustainable is Uniqlo?

Uniqlo’s 2018 Envi­ron­men­tal Poli­cy sta­ted that it’s going to adopt the use of more sus­tai­nable mate­rials inclu­ding the ban­ning of fur. It also announ­ced recy­cling and water reduc­tion. There’s a tar­get for 100% more sus­tai­nable cot­ton by 2025, for which it has joi­ned the Bet­ter Cot­ton Ini­tia­tive. The fashion brand is also imple­men­ting water reduc­tion tech­niques in jeans manu­fac­tu­ring and com­mit­ting to recy­cling with its repair and reuse pro­gram. But while these are great deve­lop­ments, it’s still baby steps com­pa­red to what is pos­sible.

The company’s sup­ply chain is not being moni­to­red and impro­ved with the help of envi­ron­men­tal mana­ge­ment tools, like the Higg Index, which can track data on impor­tant topics like ener­gy consump­tion and che­mi­cals. Because the com­pa­ny is either not in pos­ses­sion of the data or chooses not to publish it, these envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance fac­tors remain lar­ge­ly unk­nown. Without the pro­per tra­cking of these ele­ments of its sup­ply chain, a cal­cu­la­tion of its car­bon foot­print is impos­sible, which is why a sup­ply chain foot­print is mis­sing and the com­pa­ny has no tar­gets in place to reduce them either. Besides that, Uniqlo’s mate­rial poli­cy is not good, with cur­rent­ly no sus­tai­nable fibers at all. From a big com­pa­ny like Fast Retai­ling with glo­bal pre­sence, more is to be expec­ted.

The Japa­nese retai­ler doesn’t offer much trans­pa­ren­cy concer­ning its ope­ra­tions. The com­pa­ny has a Human Rights Poli­cy and it conducts third-par­ty audits through its mem­ber­ship with the Fair Labor Asso­cia­tion. All of the fac­to­ries that the com­pa­ny works with are requi­red to sign Fast Retailing’s Code of Conduct and agree to be asses­sed by third-par­ty audits like the Fair Labor Asso­cia­tion, who report on its fin­dings and indi­cate whe­ther Fast Retai­ling Inc reme­diates the faults. These are most­ly rela­ted to fire safe­ty, safe­ty at the work­place and over­time. There is also no proof that the com­pa­ny takes action towards pay­ment of a living wage. It shows that, out of the 617 fac­to­ries Fast Retai­ling works with, the FLA conduc­ted six­ty assess­ments bet­ween 2016 and 2018 in main­ly Chi­na, Viet­nam and Ban­gla­desh. The com­pa­ny is impro­ving labor condi­tions, but can improve repor­ting by increa­sing trans­pa­ren­cy and inclu­ding data of labor violations.