Ranging among sustainable cotton, resource cuts and data center efficiency, Adidas Group’s latest sustainability report gives a detailed look at the company’s plans for the next five years.
Adidas’ Environmental Strategy 2015 has the overall goal of lowering its environmental impact by 15 percent by 2015, relative to sales. Within that are many more goals covering product design, sourcing, marketing, company operations and other points in product life cycles.
The company notes that some projects will be heavily reliant on their suppliers and others in their industry to bring change.
“The major environmental impact of our operations occurs in the manufacturing of our products and the downstream supply chain,” the report says. “We only have a limited influence in this area as we have outsourced most production. Therefore, collaboration with other organisations in our industry is critical to build a consensus and the critical mass to develop effective solutions.”
One area being targeted is cotton, with Adidas aiming to have 100 percent of the cotton it uses meet the Better Cotton Initiative’s standards by 2018 (40 percent is planned to meet the standards by 2015).
“Rather than individual product teams seeking sustainable cotton, it will simply become standard across all our apparel,” wrote Adidas Group CEO Herbert Hainer in the report.
Adidas, along with H&M, Levi Strauss & Co., Marks & Spencer and IKEA, founded the Better Cotton Fast Track Program, companies that teamed up to fund farmer education and accelerate the switchover to Better Cotton Initiative standards. The first harvest of so-called Better Cotton was in October 2010.
Leather is another material other companies have come together over, in this case through the Leather Working Group, which sets standards for tanneries and rates them. By 2015, Adidas wants all of its tanneries outside of Europe to have achieved a silver or gold rating (the two highest levels) from the Leather Working Group.
Source: Greenbiz.com
By Jonathan Bardelline