With So Many Industry ‘Tools’ Coming Under Fire, What is the Role of Third-Party Certification and Ranking Systems?
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In the absence of cohesive legislation, for many brands, third-party certifications and ranking systems have become tools to help guide them on their sustainability journey, assess and measure sustainability credentials, and establish credibility amongst customers and investors. However, with the industry's certifications and standards coming under fire for perpetuating false data, enabling greenwashing, and failing to deliver system-wide transformation where does that leave brands?
License to Greenwash, a new report published by the Changing Markets Foundation, calls out what they’ve identified as a lack of transparency, accountability, compliance, and verification among popular certification initiatives, including the Higg Index by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), BlueSign, The Textile Exchange, Cradle to Cradle, WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Program), and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
The report assessed the level of ambition, the scope for continuous improvement, independence, transparency, and track record of performance for these schemes finding that many fail to drive transformative change and instead create a smokescreen for companies that want to appear to be more sustainable than they actually are.
Rather than setting strict requirements and timelines, the report found that these organizations fail to drive ambition by shifting goalposts and setting multiple levels of participation, allowing brands who only focus on low hanging fruit to claim certifications, thus appearing to be active leaders in driving sustainable change when they actually aren’t. Additionally, rather than focusing on the entire lifecycle of textile production, many of the programs investigated are not compressive and avoid issues like fast fashion, reliance on fossil fuels, microplastics, and overproduction.
License to Greenwash is the second recent report to question the fashion industry’s efforts to substantiate sustainability claims and comes ahead of the EU strategy for sustainable textiles, that will address the overconsumption and waste produced by the industry as a result of fast fashion.
One main challenge with certification programs is that sustainability is incredibly layered and nuanced. Not everyone agrees on what qualifies as “sustainable.” With no industry-wide definition, brands and organizations can decide for themselves what it means. As a result, standards and priorities differ in requirements, objectives, priorities, and solutions.
So, where do we go from here, and what is the role of certifications and multi-stakeholder initiatives?
According to the Changing Market Foundation, the solution is to do away with unproductive standards and instead usher in ambitious national and international regulations. The remaining certification programs should remove conflicts of interest, strive for impartiality, embrace a more holistic approach to products' entire lifecycle, and require brands to transparently publish information audited by a third party.
“While fashion brands double down on production and environmental destruction, they’re using sustainability certification schemes and voluntary initiatives as a smokescreen,” said CMF’s campaign manager, George Harding-Rolls, in the report’s press release. “These schemes are unambitious and unaccountable, resulting in an industry-wide decoy for unsustainable practices, enabling sophisticated greenwashing on a vast scale. We don’t need any more voluntary schemes. Certification and initiatives such as those in the report act as a placebo, creating a false promise that the industry will address sustainability voluntarily. We urgently need comprehensive legislation to change the course of the fashion industry onto a greener path.”
