Patagonia’s First Sustainability Report Reveals Stark Truth: “Our Actions Aren’t Sustainable”

Three years after Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder, transferred the company’s capital, and a decade after the company set its first sustainability goals, Patagonia, the outdoor fashion company that champions sustainability, has published its first sustainability report. The text highlights both the company’s progress and the goals it has failed to meet in these ten years, including the decarbonization of its supply chain.

“Nothing we do is sustainable,“ Patagonia highlights at the beginning of the report, which is accompanied by a letter from Chouinard in which he admits that his goal of offering an alternative to the predominant extractive model in the current system “has never been so complicated.“

Patagonia set its first sustainable goals in 2015, the main one being to achieve climate neutrality by 2040, for which the company needs to reduce its emissions by 10% each year. Last year, however, and to which the report refers, the evolution has been the opposite, with a 2% increase in emissions compared to the previous year, to 182,646 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Patagonia has increased its emissions by 2% in the last fiscal year

The company has attributed this rise to a change in its product range, consisting of more backpacks than garments, a product made from more carbon-intensive materials. For the coming year, however, the company expects the figure to fall again, a drop it attributes to its support programs for suppliers, the link in the chain that accounts for more than 90% of the emissions of companies in the sector.

Patagonia, which closed its last fiscal year (period ended April 30th) with a turnover of $1.47 billion, 61% of which was concentrated in the United States, operates in a total of 45 countries around the world, with a commercial network of 106 stores and 5,700 multi-brand stores.

Another of Patagonia’s major objectives is to use more sustainable materials in all its products, an objective in which it has advanced at a much faster pace. At the end of the year, 84.1% of the materials used by the company are considered “preferential”, mainly recycled. Specifically, 93% of the polyester used by the company is already recycled, along with another 89% of nylon.

The company has highlighted its progress in the use of “preferred” materials, despite the challenges of introducing recycled textile waste

Overall, the figure has been increasing in recent years, from 46.6% more sustainable materials in 2018, to verging on 85% today. The company, however, has stressed that the current challenge is to replace recycled synthetic fibers that come from other sectors, mainly packaging, with fabrics recycled from textile waste.

“Scaling this has been a challenge,“ Patagonia explains in the report, “we have learned that it is very complicated to take mixed and contaminated waste and turn it into material of sufficient quality to make our products.

Of the outdoor fashion company’s total objectives, the report highlights the main advances in two of them. On the one hand, in the use of more sustainable materials, but also in eliminating the use of chemicals in its products. “Today, 100% of our new products are manufactured without the intentional addition of PFAs, or perfluoroalkyl substances,“ says the company.

“Profit has never been Patagonia’s goal, but money and the way we manage the company are two of the most effective tools we have to protect nature,“ Patagonia’s founder defends in the text. Chouinard adds that it is precisely the search for short-term profit that is destroying not only the planet, but also the future prospects of many companies. When Patagonia was founded,“ he recalls, “the life expectancy of an American company was 30 years; today, it is less than 18 years”.