My Footprint:
The national average carbon footprint is 21 tons and I’m under that average with 11 tons. I think I’m under the average mostly because I live in such a small space, walk, and take the subway to commute as opposed to driving a car. I’m glad to hear that I’m under the national average but I don’t feel super proud of this since I learned how much paper and plastic I go through pretty recently and that still sits with me. I feel like this is often the case for people in New york: what they give up in space of living they make up for with food, clothes, etc. So just because I’m not living in a larger space and driving a car everyday doesn’t mean I’m not going through as much waste and harming the environment at a similar rate to other Americans.
Reformation:
I picked to research Reformation’s carbon footprint. This brand does label themselves as sustainable and I usually see it all over their website, it is also one of the reasons they justify pricing their clothes higher so I was excited to research this. Their footprint included 158 Metric Tons of waste compared to the average of 177 Metric tons, 90 million gallons of water compared to the average 163 million, and 2,825 metric tons of carbon dioxide compared to the average 3,181 metric tons. They also display how they had improved these numbers from last year and acknowledged that C02 Footprint was only improved by 5% and that they strive to do better in this area. Included in their report is that their factories are audited by a third party monitoring firm. I don’t know enough about factory safety to determine how reputable this information is in defending the health and fair treatments of their workers. Their report includes a lot of transparency which is really impressive compared to other brands but still seeing those numbers of waste is pretty overwhelming, but they can show with detail that they are putting a large effort and awareness into paying attention to this impact which is admirable.
H&M
For the second company I researched I wanted to pick one that I know as less sustainable and fair so I chose H&M. Finding their information was very confusing for me. I was only able to find the sustainability report from 2016 and the most recent one was nowhere to be found and I’m not sure if it is published. The sustainability report is 124 pages and the first 45 of them are only about their vision and goals it takes you a really long time to find any actual concrete information and data about their current standing. I thought this was interesting and I compared it to Reformation’s report which was a summary and was one long graphic. While I think it’s definitely important to include detail in a report Reformations is a lot more transparent in that they lay their information out in a really accessible way while in H&M’s report you have to dig through to find it which suggests maybe they aren’t as proud to display it. Their numbers are really large and I understand they’re a much bigger company but their report is loaded with “visions” and a lot of distracting information. While it is good to have goals I was unimpressed by the lack of information and concrete progress that this company is making.
