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Measuring
Footprints
A new program at Patagonia tells
consumers about the eco-impact
of its products—and
helps the company get greener.
By
Alissa Walker, FastCompany.com
 It
seems like a typical Southern California scene: On
a sunny afternoon, a camera-toting woman has tracked
her subjects to an obscure corner of South Los Angeles,
and she's snapping photos like a paparazzo. But she's
no celeb stalker—her subjects are towers of
Turkish cotton and pallets of organic yarn. Jill
Dumain, director of environmental analysis for the
apparel company Patagonia, is investigating one of
its T-shirt suppliers, Nature USA, for an initiative
called the Footprint Chronicles, an effort to document
and share with customers information about the environmental
effects of every link in the supply chain.
Going
green is an increasingly big part of business these
days, but you wouldn't expect Patagonia to have to
worry much. It's a longtime leader in sustainable manufacturing,
founded by environmentalist Yvon Chouinard in 1973.
Yet in this new age of consumer awareness, as customers
have become eco-savvier, Patagonia has gotten more
and more questions about its products' provenance that
it can't answer. "The green marketplace has become
crowded," says Dumain. "We've had to learn
to communicate in circles that are very different than
they were 10 to 15 years ago, which is good." In
more ways than one: The footprint project, intended
as a consumer-education experiment, has put the company's
design and manufacturing process under the microscope.
Patagonia has been forced to examine how green it actually
is—and where it can improve.
In
May 2007, Chouinard challenged a group of 10 employees
to track five products from the design studio to
the raw-materials stage to Patagonia's Nevada distribution
center. His gumshoes canvassed the globe, observing
yarn spinners in Thailand, visiting a 50,000-employee
footwear factory in China, touring a fiber-manufacturing
facility in North Carolina. A microsite at patagonia.com,
featuring short videos (also available on YouTube)
and detailed information, quietly went live last
fall. The paths of 10 more products, including the
Nature USA organic-cotton T-shirt, will go up this
year.
Patagonia
vowed to share whatever it found, good and bad. One
positive surprise was the low energy expenditure
of transporting its products, usually thought to
be a dirty part of the process. Patagonia discovered
that shipping by sea represented less than 1% of
the total energy use in its supply chain. "If
we had followed environmental chatter and spent all
that time shortening our supply chains, it would
have had a huge impact on our product quality," Dumain
says. "To realize that our conservation efforts
needed to be focused elsewhere was really freeing."
The
actual manufacturing, though, devoured more energy
than expected—and sometimes created eco-unfriendly
by-products. For instance, as the team tracked the
production of the Eco Rain Shell jacket, they focused
on perfluoro-octanoic acid (PFOA)—a chemical that
accumulates in the bloodstream and may be toxic—which is found in water-repellent membranes and coatings
used in Patagonia parkas. The company believed that
PFOA-free materials would sacrifice performance.
But that was little comfort to consumers who learned
about PFOA through the Web site—one wrote an email
demanding that "Eco" be dropped from the
product's name.
The
footprint-chronicling process highlighted the complexity
of modern technology. Patagonia is trying to remove
PFOA from its lines—by fall, the PFOA-containing
membranes will be replaced by polyester and polyurethane,
with no performance lost, it says—but it has not
found a viable alternative to the existing coatings. "We
don't want to sacrifice quality for environmental
reasons," Dumain says. "If a garment is
thrown away sooner due to a lack of durability, we
haven't solved any environmental problem." Patagonia's
efforts reflect a more nuanced understanding of corporate
social responsibility, according to Joel Makower,
executive editor of the blog Greenbiz.com. "You're
now responsible for the impacts of your suppliers," he
says, "and sometimes your suppliers' suppliers,
your customers, and their customers."
Patagonia
admits that its findings are limited; only the primary
materials are traced, and no packaging is evaluated.
It also allows that by putting production information
in the public domain, it gives its competitors access
too. Dumain concludes that the benefits of openness
outweigh the costs, because the company wants to
spur others to action: "Our influence is larger
than our impact. If we're willing to share that information,
it becomes exponential."
Dumain
notes that a group of firms with progressive sustainability
agendas—Stonyfield Farm, Aveda, Ben & Jerry's,
Seventh Generation—have long informally shared
best practices. "These companies have been working
together for years to raise the bar," says Andrea
Asch, manager of natural-resources use at Ben & Jerry's. "That's
where Patagonia is with these Footprint Chronicles—that's the new bar."
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