“Our ultimate dream is to have companies manage CO2 just like they manage cost and revenue,” Marc Laurent tells Fashionista from Paris. “Right now, most of them don’t care.”
Laurent is the founder of Carbonfact, a startup that aims to help fashion brands understand and measure their carbon footprint. Since 2001, carbon accounting has allowed for companies across industries to quantify and manage their greenhouse gas emissions. Though it has come under scrutiny in recent years for unreliability and inaccuracy, many brands still rely on this process to get a sense of their impact on the environment, especially when it comes to how their products are made. It’s an imperfect tool, but it’s one of the few we have.
Carbonfact aims to make creating a life cycle assessment (LCA) for products faster and easier through its specialized software. It enables companies to calculate, simulate and estimate their LCA and carbon impact, rather than only knowing it retrospectively (the former precedent). This can allow brands to understand how changes in design and other processes can affect carbon output before products are even made. Rather than focusing on offsetting emissions (which is a controversial practice), the company empowers companies to lower carbon emissions in the first place.
Carbonfact has worked with brands like New Balance and Allbirds already. Its latest partner is the B Corp Certified lingerie brand Adore Me, which was acquired by Victoria’s Secret in November 2022. “In the future, companies will have a sophisticated tool to measure their carbon emissions, not once a year, but on a daily basis they will be able to build, estimate, forecast, et cetera,” Laurent predicts.
Carbonfact syncs with a company’s internal systems to provide real-time insights. For Adore Me, this means the startup’s software automatically pulls data from the company’s orders with suppliers, for example, on items like material type and weight to calculate carbon impact.
According to its VP of Strategy, Ranjan Roy, Adore Me began the process of transforming its sustainability practices in 2019. “The idea was: How do we get everyone involved integrated into thinking about this kind of stuff?” he explains. “Our customer’s not going to buy from us because we’re making these bold claims either way. So, it allows us to wait until we feel confident that we can set a goal, that we actually can map out a path to getting there.”
Through its work with Carbonfact, Adore Me has changed the material composition of some of its lingerie — opting for a higher percentage of recycled fabrics at times. “With the help of the production scenario simulator, we were able to assess the environmental impact of our supply chain and make an informed decision to move part of our manufacturing from China to Vietnam,” Roy says. “This change has resulted in a 12% reduction in the carbon footprint of our upcoming January 2024 spring collection.”
One of the pitfalls of “sustainable” fashion is that it can come with a premium price tag, but Adore Me is committed to not raising its prices in the name of sustainability — even “as we incorporated better materials, which is hard,” Roy says.
The fashion industry is a known aggressor on the climate’s wellbeing, accounting for as much as 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and a whopping 20% of global wastewater. Measuring carbon emissions alone doesn’t capture the whole picture of a company’s environmental impact, but Roy argues it’s still helpful, offering a common language.
“Trying to communicate across different teams or across different functions, people just have completely different ways of looking at sustainability because it’s such a vague concept,” he says.
Adore Me also leans on a scale it built in-house called AIM, which grades products out of five across four categories: waste, water, fabrics and chemicals. No product is a perfect five out of five, Roy concedes. “We have all this room to improve,” he says. “The idea is, over the next decade, this allows us to keep moving in that direction.”
The most important step a brand can take to truly understand its carbon impact is to collect a lot of data — including data that Laurent assumed most brands would already have on hand. “For example, I would’ve thought that knowing the weight of your material components would be very easy for them,” he says.
Though multi-billion-dollar fast-fashion brands get heavy pushback from the fashion world, Laurent wants to partner with them next. “This is where most of the carbon emissions in that sector come [from], where we need to work first,” he says. He’s also focused on working with more “legacy brands because they are sometimes counted as key opinion leaders. If you’re able to work with LVMH or some luxury brands, you can attract other brands… and help them decrease carbon emissions.”
But without enough data and analysis, companies can’t realistically know their impact. For now, Carbonfact is focused on providing data around carbon emissions, but it recently released an indicator on water consumption. Laurent says there are more environmental indicators to come as the platform grows, including for land use and human toxicity levels.
“To make the right decisions you need first to inform,” Laurent says. “You need to inform at scale, dynamically and at most affordable price as possible.”
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Source: Fashionista.com
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