How sustainable is Mango?
Mango is a fashion brand with stores all over the world. The Spanish company shows the first signs of improvements and commitments towards more sustainable practises, but is far from it yet.
Labor rights are especially interesting to further investigate with Mango since it was one of the companies producing at the Rana Plaza when a disaster occured. Though the company did sign the legally binding Bangladesh Accord, in which manufacturers agreed to improve working conditions in Bangladesh, the company afterwards refused to pay compensation to the victims. After a lot of outside pressure, it did pay compensation, but didn’t disclose the amount publicly.
With that being said and done, it’s interesting to see where the company’s at today. At the time of the Rana Plaza disaster, a lot of companies who produced in high-risk countries did the auditing themselves and since the disaster occured one of the big changes that happened in the fashion industry was the introduction of independent third-party audits that ensure proper labor rights in the supply chain.
Since 2017, the company has been working together with Amfori, and it has implemented the Business Social Compliance Initiative to improve social performance in its supply chain. The organization conducts third-party audits and makes sure that the workers’ rights described in the Code of Conduct are adhered to. The Amfori system is internal and the results of the audits are not published, so what we actually know about the working conditions is very little. What we do know is that the company does not publish a factory list and that its Code of Conduct does not include payment of a living wage.
The company is starting to improve environmentally. It publishes a sustainability report and data on carbon emissions it generates yearly, including emissions in the supply chain. It has offset some of the emissions in its owned facilities, but there is no data provided on actual emission and water reductions and improvements on renewable energy usage. There is no notable target to reduce emissions in the future either.
Material sourcing remains largely unknown. The brand does specify that it used 117,672,237 m² of fibres in 2017 and that 55% of that were synthetic chemical fibers and 45% had a natural origin. There is no information about what materials these exactly are and no percentages about if these specific materials were sourced, but MANGO does state that the company produced over 4 million garments in with sustainable characteristics in 2017, which represents 3% of MANGO’s entire production including all its lines. The actual meaning of this last sentence is up to you. What is clear is that the company is working on improving the percentage of more sustainable materials, and it shows in its ambitious target for 50% more sustainable cotton by 2020 and a partnership with the Better Cotton Initiative. The materials that originated from animals remain unknown as well.
