Fashion Cloud is climate neutral
In light of the climate crisis, we all need to take action and act both individually and collectively to protect the climate. The textile industry produces 1.2 billion tons of CO2 annually – more than all international flights and cruises combined. As part of the Fashion Wholesale community, we see it as our responsibility to act too. Our first milestone: Fashion Cloud is now officially a climate-neutral company.
How does holistic climate protection work?
Let’s make things clear: there is no such thing as a company without CO2 emissions. The principle of holistic corporate climate protection is to avoid unnecessary emissions, reduce existing emissions and offset unavoidable emissions. Even without resource-intensive production, Fashion Cloud produces emissions – for example, through business travel, energy supply or data storage. A company is climate-neutral when it calculates all its CO2 emissions and offsets them with the help of internationally recognized climate protection projects. Sounds easy? It was a challenge we were happy to take on!
Determining the corporate carbon footprint
The corporate carbon footprint serves to identify the main sources of emissions within the company and along the upstream and downstream stages of the value chain. It thus forms the basis for a climate protection strategy. To determine the Fashion Cloud carbon footprint, we work together with ClimatePartner. Which emission sources are included in the CO2 balance? The GHG Protocol describes three categories (scopes) that encompass all direct and indirect CO2 emissions of the company as well as all other CO2 emissions that are not under direct corporate control. The Fashion Cloud carbon footprint takes into account, among other things: Heating and company cars (Scope 1), electricity (Scope 2), flights, train travel, catering, external data centers (Scope 3) and many other emission sources. Our carbon footprint amounts to 93,000 kg of CO2. The majority of this is due to Scope 2 and travel accounts for the largest share.
Climate protection project with biomass
We fully offset the CO2 emissions of our business activities in cooperation with ClimatePartner through a biomass project in Soacha, Colombia. In the climate protection project we selected, coal energy is replaced by energy from renewable biomass (waste from coconut shells and wood or residues from sugar cane processing). Why did we choose this project? It not only produces renewable energy for local needs and saves 18,000 tons of CO2 each year, it also secures jobs for 115 people in Soacha. In addition, the project is certified by the internationally recognized Gold Standard. By the way: Since greenhouse gas concentrations are roughly the same all over the world, it does not matter where on earth emissions are caused or avoided.
And where do we go from here?
Climate neutrality is an important step. However, the real goal is to keep reducing the carbon footprint in the long term. And what happens next? We are optimizing our CO2 accounting process and start with the issue that weighs most heavily: Business travel. To meet our customers personally and provide them with the best possible support, we are travelling often. Now our goal is not to return to pre-pandemic travel patterns. We want to enable all our colleagues to make smarter, climate-friendly travel decisions after the pandemic. We also see the greatest potential in helping the fashion industry become more climate conscious. Our content and order solutions are already replacing trade show travel and saving energy and resources in photo and sample production. We are working on supporting the industry even more in the future to protect the climate!