When it comes to sustainable fashion, Amazon is not the first company that comes to mind. The e-commerce giant is one of the biggest purveyors of clothing in the United States, and much of what it sells, including its own private label lines like Amazon Essentials, are not known for their sustainable materials.
But Amazon wants to position itself at the center of a major effort to clean up the fashion industry. Today, The Climate Pledge, the net-zero initiative Amazon co-founded in 2019, is spinning out a new program, the Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition, alongside brands like Stella McCartney, Another Tomorrow, and Brooks Running. It also has support from the World Economic Forum and the forest-conservation nonprofit Canopy.
The coalition consists of more than 60 fashion brands, manufacturers, retailers, and material innovators, including names like Anna Sui, Selfridges, Vestiaire Collective. It also includes major players in the sustainable materials industry, like the textile recycling company Circ, the zero-waste knitting technology Unspun, and the plant-based fiber company Bananatex.
Coalition members get access to a new Fashion Coalition Lever Library, a database of more than 100 decarbonization solutions that includes guidance about how to use each fiber and a directory of suppliers. The coalition is also working with the World Economic Forum on financing models that pair financial institutions with private investors to fund promising materials.
Why Fashion?
Sally Fouts, director of The Climate Pledge at Amazon, says the team chose to focus on fashion because it is a heavy emitter and existing sustainability coalitions haven’t made much progress on their goal. It’s also an industry consumers have an intimate relationship with. “Fashion is a pretty personal thing for people,” she says. Other high-emitting sectors the Pledge works on, like shipping, aren’t “an everyday thing that they put on their body and care deeply about.”
While many low-carbon materials already exist in the fashion industry—from recycled fibers to mushroom-based leather—fashion brands often operate on thin margins and don’t feel like they can afford to pay a premium for them. Meanwhile, the startups making those materials can’t lower prices until they reach scale, and they can’t reach scale without big orders.
The goal of the coalition is to bring companies together to aggregate demand, so that suppliers can be assured of big orders. And the Climate Pledge will also be working to identify the most eco-friendly mills and spinners, to help them scale quickly. The hope is that as volumes grow, costs drop. “The goal is cost parity at least, if not even lower than current materials,” Fouts says.
Peter Majeranowski, the CEO of Circ, is optimistic that the Pledge will meet its goal. “Amazon has done this before in other sectors, whether it’s creating low-carbon cement or sending demand signals for Rivian by putting in orders for electric vans,” he says.
Joining is free, but it comes with commitments. Signatories must agree to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement. They must commit to measuring and reporting their emissions regularly, and decarbonize their own operations as much as possible. If they still cannot get to net-zero emissions, they are allowed to buy carbon offsets. “We have quite a bit of language around what qualifies as a credible offset,” Fouts says.
The fast-fashion gap
Still, there’s a notable gap in the coalition. Most of the brands involved are higher-end labels. The bulk of clothing sold today is cheap fast fashion, including much of what Amazon makes and sells. Fouts argues that lower-priced brands, with even thinner margins, will come on board once costs fall. “The goal is to bring the cost of those materials down so that the larger, lower-price-point manufacturers and fashion companies are able to also have access to these products,” she says. “That’s the ultimate win.”
That logic makes sense, but it also lets the biggest players off the hook. Amazon has enormous purchasing power, and its private-label brands could be the anchor customer that makes these materials viable. But as of right now, Amazon’s own apparel brands are not leading the charge when it comes to switching to less carbon-intensive materials. “Where it makes sense to incorporate one of these new materials or new solutions, we’ll be looking at those, just as all of the other companies that are in the Pledge and in the coalition will be doing,” Fouts says.
Even so, the coalition is a welcome sign at a moment when the sustainability movement has gone quiet. Fouts says that she’s observed firsthand that the 700 companies within Amazon’s Climate Pledge are not slowing down. Climate investments play out over decades, and a lot of work has been quietly happening behind the scenes. “They’re in the game, they’re doing the work, they’re making investments,” she says.