Clothing brands, like all big businesses, are arm-wrestling regulators to de-fang looming carbon reporting deadlines. Why not embrace a solution that removes the knots, and weaves all the threads together?
Fashion is one of many big-emitter sectors facing new legal obligations to report carbon footprints accurately and verifiably. Like most big businesses, Big T-Shirt’s response has been to negotiate the new requirements away, rather than getting ahead of the game by embracing them. Either way, sooner or later they’ll confront the ‘SME Paradox’. This article uses The T-Shirt’s Tale to explain the problem, and See Through Carbon’s ecosystem solution.
The T-Shirt’s Tale: simple version
We all buy T-shirts, but few of us know their complicated backstory.
Here’s a 100-word children’s version of The T-Shirts’s Tale, which could have been told before carbon reporting.
You buy a cotton T-shirt from a shop. The shop didn’t make the T-shirt!
The shop bought the T-shirt from a garment-maker. The garment-maker didn’t knit the fabric!
The garment-maker bought the fabric from a textile-maker. The textile-maker didn’t spin the yarn!
The textile-maker bought the yarn from a spinner. The spinner didn’t grow the cotton!
The spinner bought the cotton from a trader. The trader didn’t grow the cotton!
The trader bought the cotton from a wholesaler. The wholesaler didn’t grow the cotton!
The wholesaler bought it from a farmer. The farmer grew the cotton!
And that, Dear Reader, is where your cotton T-shirt came from!
Like any children’s story, this version of The T-Shirt’s Tale misses out many real-world steps.
- The textiles industry involves many more processing steps like ginning, blending, carding, dying or finishing.
- The cotton in a single T-shirt could come from hundreds of farms.
- Bales from any farm might pass through dozens of wholesalers and traders before reaching the spinner.
- The spinner, knowingly or not, might blend cotton fibres from different sources.
Let’s not even get into the stories of T. Shirt’s friends Fred the Thread and Benjamin Button. Their backstories are just as complicated.
So why tell The T-Shirt’s Tale?
Globalisation – it’s everywhere
Even the kids version of The T-Shirt’s Tale shows how complex global supply chains have become.
The real-world version is more like a Dostoevsky novel.
Like many everyday items, even a simple garment made from a single material, millions of people, thousands of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and dozens of big businesses, might be involved before we pick them up in a shop.
Most of us are too focused on the colour, design or feel or cut of the garment, to pay much attention to the label stitched into the collar. That label hints at the complexity of the Dostoevsky version of the T-Shirt’s Tale:
- ‘Made In China’ – or Vietnam, or Bangladesh, or wherever – only tells you where the label was attached to the finished T-shirt. Tariffs and quotas mean stitching a label could have been the only thing that was done, to dodge tariffs. Every step described in the kid’s version could have taken place in different factories in different countries.
- ‘100% Cotton’ refers only to the genus of the plant that evolved long fibres to protect its seeds. Gossypium hirsutam makes up 90% of the world’s commercial cotton crop, but there are three other commercially farmed Gossypium species. You can’t even be sure which species of cotton make up your T-shirt.
- The fibres that end up in your T-shirt might be blended from two or more of the world’s dozens of cotton-producing countries. Guess China, India or the US, and you’re odds-on to be right, as they produce around 60% of the world’s cotton between them. Only the wholesalers, traders and spinners know the truth.
China, India and the US also happen to be the world’s top three carbon emitters, generating 53% of global emissions.
Now we’re starting to get to the real point of The T-Shirt’s Tale.
Clothing’s Carbon Footprint
Just about any human activity these days generates greenhouse gas emissions. In the half-century since climate scientists started sounding the alarm, we’ve become pretty good at measuring our emissions.
For major industries like textiles and apparel, the numbers are well understood, but how much do you know? A pop quiz (answers to come):
- What proportion of a T-Shirt’s emissions are from transport and distribution?
- How many kilograms of greenhouse gas does it take to make 1kg of T-shirt?
- What percentage of global emissions come from what we wear?
Now for the answers.
T-Shirt emission sources
Most of a T-Shirt’s emissions come from inputs like fertilizer, processes like dyeing, and the power consumed by machinery used along the way. Transport is only 1% of the cost, which partially explains why the textile industry is so globalised. Shipping costs for shifting all those components to the cheapest place for the next process, turn out to be marginal.
T-Shirt emission volume
Here’s a league table of the average carbon footprints of types of fibre. The numbers represent how many kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions are required to produce 1kg of each product.
The detailed numbers for any particular product vary depending on how they’re produced (which is why measuring them accurately is so important). Still, these approximations might surprise most T-shirt buyers:
Wool: 46
Acrylic: 38
Viscose: 30
Cotton: 28
Silk: 25
Polyester: 21
Linen: 15
If garment labels stated these numbers, would they influence how often you bought a T-shirt? The labels could even explain the sources for these emissions:
Wool, the fur of belching, farting sheep, requires loads of energy just to remove the natural oils and clean it up enough for processing. Wool does, however, last for a long time, and has historically been produced sustainably.
Fibres made from trees (viscose), plants (cotton) and insects (silk) have similar carbon footprints. Much less than wool, but around twice that of flax (linen). Synthetic fibres vary in their emissions intensity, but as by-products of the petrochemical industry, are inherently unsustainable. You can grow more cotton, trees, or flax, but not more oil.
Clothing emissions
Most of us are familiar with the carbon cost of aviation (around 3% of total emissions).
We’re starting to realise the growing threat of data centres (also around 3%).
Ask us to name big emitting activities, and we may say transport (around 20%), or agriculture (10%).
So how come we’re not even aware that what we wear generates around 10% of total emissions, including the equivalent of a truckful of garments being dumped in landfill every second?
Does 10% sound unrealistically high? Well, if you assign emissions differently, clothing’s share of the emissions pie can be reckoned to be as low as 3%, but this only reinforces the importance of a shared understanding of carbon accounting methodologies.
Tax authorities wouldn’t tolerate a margin of error as wide as 3-10% if businesses calculated their profits differently. Why is it OK when it comes to carbon accounting?
Why, instead, are we still talking about what colours, fabrics, cuts and hemlines are in this year?
Fashion Tells The Stories It Wants To Tell
The answers, of course, are:
- Talking about this season’s colour palette sells more T-shirts
- Talking about T-shirt emissions would do the opposite
- Business values money over carbon
- We let our governments let them get away with it
The global textile industry has been particularly successful at concealing these inconvenient truths. They are master storytellers, and know how to control the narrative.
Imagine if every T-shirt label read, by law:
‘6kg of greenhouse gases were emitted in the manufacture of this T-shirt, about the same weight as a mini-fridge’.
Would you be more, or less, likely to buy fewer T-shirts and wear them longer? Would you still be as focused on the price, which can be anywhere from £4 (Primark) to £1,024 (Hermés), if you knew they emitted the same volume of carbon?
Imagine the response any clothing brand, fast fashion or haute couture, would have if the EU proposed making such labelling mandatory.
Now apply it to carbon reporting, and you’re getting the drift of this story.
Fashion brands are storytelling specialists. They’ve been allowed to distract us with pretty colours, the latest fashions, and greenwash. So far, we’ve been happy to be distracted.
If the science behind these emissions calculations is so clear, and the numbers are so shocking, why do we know so little about it?
Cleaning up fashion
The simple answer is that the fashion industry would rather keep it as their dirty secret, and regulators have allowed fashion brands to get away with it. Plus, we probably don’t really want to know.
Greenwashing, greenhushing, obfuscation, sanctimony, evasion and obtuseness are not unique to the textile sector, but we’re telling The T-Shirt’s Tale because they’re particularly good at it.
To begin to get a grip on carbon reduction, we must first track where emissions come from. Not with vague estimates, but with the same degree of precision and comprehensiveness we use for tracking money, accounting for every link the the supply chain.
In other words, proper carbon reporting, not some performative, diluted, de-fanged version that Big T-Shirt would prefer.
We’ve now set the scene for the real-world version of The T-Shirt’s Tale.
The tale is still unravelling, and no one can be sure how the story ends, but we’ll provide two alternative endings…
Fashion’s Brussels challenge
You’re a big European fashion brand – H&M, Zara, Hermés. Whatever.
New EU regulations mean you now have to accurately report your carbon footprint. China, along with many others, has also recently passed similar carbon reporting regulations.
These new rules require you to count everything:
- Not just the emissions from your own premises (‘Scope 1’).
- Not just the emissions from the energy to power your offices, shops, warehouses and factories (‘Scope 2’),
- But also all the emissions accumulated before and after we buy your scarves, socks, jackets, trousers,T-shirts etc. (‘Scope 3’).
Calculating Scopes 1 and 2 is easy. You already have all the data necessary to make the calculations. You, or some specialist carbon accountant, just need to multiply the number of units by a credible conversion factor, add them up, and include them in your submission to the EU.
Multinationals might bleat at the ‘extra red tape’, but they can easily afford to tot up Scopes 1 and 2 themselves, or outsource it to a specialist.
But what about your Scope 3?
The Scope 3 Dilemma
In most businesses, Scope 3 can be 80% of total emissions.
This is why, after years of trusting big business to self-regulate, governments are finally getting serious about carbon reporting. What if businesses only reported 20% of their revenue to the tax authorities?
Even the children’s version of The T-Shirt’s Tale shows fashion multinationals have fiendishly complex supply chains making up their Scope 3. What happens in the real world, when you multiply the garment maker, the fabric maker, the spinner, the traders, wholesalers and farmers by an international fashion brand?
A major fashion brand’s supply chain is made up of hundreds or thousands of suppliers, sub-suppliers, wholesalers, farmers and petrochemical fibre producers. The new regulations not only require you to include them all, but to be able to account for their contributions, and prove your calculations.
This is a game-changer. Carbon reporting is no longer a figment of the creative imaginations of the wacky greenwashing creatives in your PR Department. That’s ‘self-regulation’, when you get to set your own rules and mark your own homework.
New carbon reporting regulations shift carbon reporting to the bean-counters in your Compliance and Accounting Departments. The same unsmiling guys who do the internal audits to prove you’re paying the right amount of tax to the authorities.
So what must your unsmiling bean-counters do to comply with the new EU rules on reporting carbon footprints, as well as revenue, profit and tax?
In particular, how will they work out your fashion brand’s fiendishly complicated Scope 3?
How to calculate your business’s carbon footprint
To calculate any business’s Scope 3 in a credible, verifiable, auditable way, you’ll need:
- The actual carbon footprints of every business in your supply chain.
- The percentage of their total footprint you’re responsible for.
Multiply A by B, tot them all up, and that’s your Scope 3. Add it to your Scope 1 and 2 numbers, pop it in the post to Brussels, and you’re compliant.
Simple multiplication and addition. Much simpler than, say, tax accounting, analysing your profit margin, or the hundreds of other calculations your unsmiling bean-counters perform every day.
The twist to this real-world version of The T-Shirt’s Tale is that your dilemma is not a technical one. The dilemma is getting real data from your supply chain in order to do your simple multiplication and addition. (We’re just planting that bombshell, so more on that later. Most of us still need some exposition on carbon accounting basics.)
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) provides a common accounting framework. Others are available – some flavour of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) works well for super-energy intensive standardised products like steel, aluminium, fertilizer etc.
Whichever framework, or combination of methodologies you prefer, you’ll need credible ‘conversion factors’ to calculate your footprint, in the same way you need credible standards and protocols to justify business expenses or depreciation to the taxman.
There are plenty of conversion factors available. The rule of thumb, like most things, is the free versions will give you OK results, but if you want really accurate measurements you may need to pay for granular conversion factors. The more bespoke to your particular supply chain, the more accurate your carbon footprint.
Your R&D departments will be familiar with this kind of information. The information they need to develop new materials for your products is far more complex and detailed. Decent open source approximations, available for free, will get you most of the way towards a reasonable outcome. More accurate commercial measurements can be bought at a price.
Whether you go for the free approximations or the expensive bespoke conversion factors largely depends on:
a) how important it is to you (will your product pass quality standards, or be illegal?)
b) what you can get away with (what are the costs of non-compliance?)
Note that a) is driven by regulation, and b) by how seriously the regulators enforce and punish. Governments matter.
Back to the real-world T-Shirt’s Tale.
Now the regulators, like the EU, no longer allow you to mark your own carbon reporting homework, using your PR’s department’s made-up rules, what would you do?
In the real-world T-Shirt’s Tale, not the kid’s version, what happens next?
Did the fashion industry immediately resolve to become models of carbon reporting, sack their PR greenwashers and replace them with new unsmiling Compliance Department bean-counters?
The Lobbying Playbook
No.
Global fashion brands, like any big business faced with the prospect of any new regulation, big business, reckoned they knew what their shareholders would expect of them.
They reached for the Lobbying Playbook:
- Whine (‘red tape will strangle entrepreneurs’)
- Threaten (‘red tape will raise prices and cost jobs’)
- Plead (‘let’s negotiate a reasonable alternative’)
This arm-wrestle is familiar to governments attempting to regulate anything, parents with teenagers, or teachers imposing classroom discipline.
They all come down to Whine/Threaten/Plead tactics vs laying down the law. Regulators, parents and teachers know that if they give an inch, businesses, teens and pupils will take a mile.
Both sides know it’s a permanent state of attrition -the lobbying doesn’t end when draft regulation becomes law. For reluctant rule-takers, a ‘transition phases’ or ‘preparation grace periods’ is a new opportunity to deploy the Lobbying Playbook, and negotiate a ‘better’ (i.e. cheaper and less inconvenient) deal.
This raises the stakes for any rule-maker. Brussels, like a parent or teacher, knows that implementing its Green Deal regulations requires showing teeth. Like a high school teacher, you must set an example. To show you’re serious, start with the worst offenders.
That’s why the EU targeted the textile, apparel and footwear sector to get its Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) ball rolling:
- Fashion is a particularly emissions-intensive business: all those inputs to make the raw materials, all those components criss-crossing the globe, all the processes involved in those long supply chains snaking around the globe.
- Fashion also has a particularly egregious track record for greenwashing.
- We all wear clothes. Many of us have strong emotional attachments to brands.
So in our real-world version of The T-Shirt’s Tale, how did it turn out?
Who won the arm-wrestle?
Victory?
The answer depends on when you think the story has ended, and whether you’re rooting for a sustainable future, or short-term share price.
If you end the story in 2025, a few months before the Jan 2026 deadline for the fashion industry’s first ‘proper’ carbon reports, Big T-Shirt can claim some sort of victory.
Their efforts to do what they thought their shareholders wanted, and deploy the Lobbying Playbook, paid off. Europe’s textile and fashion behemoths:
- whined, threatened and pleaded to their national governments
- whined, threatened and pleaded to Brussels.
- whined, threatened and pleaded via trade bodies, lobbyists and thinktanks
- whined, threatened and pleaded via media proxies
Following the Playbook, they claimed the EU’s new carbon reporting rules would be impossibly onerous and/or ruinously expensive to implement.
Instead of beefing up their Compliance department, fashion brands spent the couple of years grace period they had to prepare on their PR gurus.
The results can be found in the small print of the CSRD/CSDDD Omnibus Negotiating Mandate. You need to be fluent in EU-jargon to translate it, but the executive summary for those busy fashion brand bosses would be ‘Job done: diluted, delayed, diminished’.
In short, a victory for business as usual. Bonuses all round.
But in the real world, the story doesn’t end here, does it?
Defeat?
Applying old-school lobbying tactics to the climate emergency is a category error. Think of it as:
- Bringing a knife to a gun-fight
- King Cnut’s famous attempt to test the limits of human power against the laws of nature by commanding the tide to reverse
- A monkey claiming it’s made progress towards reaching the moon by climbing a tree
Carbon don’t care. Every greenhouse gas molecule released as a result of Big T-Short’s ‘victory’ still ends up in our atmosphere, reflecting more heat back to earth.
Choosing to end the story with the EU’s climbdown on implementation is a self-delusional storytelling trick.
Fashion brands victory over carbon reporting regulation is as meaningful as the man falling from a skyscraper cheerfully shouting to the office workers looking out their windows ‘So far so good!’.
Why? Delay has only made the problem the EU designed the new carbon reporting regulations to fix worse. Further delay of even the modest and inadequate requirements of the CSRD only hastens the point at which even all-powerful fashion brands will be forced to actually do something about it, rather than merely pretend to, or avoid it.
To date, the story of corporate response to government attempts at climate regulation has largely been winning early skirmishes in a war they’re doomed to lose. Pyrrhic victories like their CSRD lobbying can boost short-term profits. Bosses may even be able to retire and die peacefully in their sleep, before anyone has to actually take responsibility. Their children and grandkids, however, won’t have that luxury.
So The T-Shirt’s Tale does not end here. It started with the Industrial Revolution and globalisation, and will continue so long as we can buy T-shirts in shops, however long that may be.
Unless the climate fixes itself, there’s only one direction of travel.
Is there an alternative, less bleak, version of The T-Shirt’s Tale?
Heroes, Likely and Unlikely
First, we need a hero.
Imagine you’re a maverick fashion brand boss who decides to break from the pack, and embrace the new carbon reporting regulations.
As Fashion Boss Hero, you can write your own script. You can be motivated by
- Your Trusted Assistant’s plea to create a better world for her new-born grandkid
- Getting the jump on your competitors, Moneyball style, by innovating
- Monetising the EU’s cap-and-trade carbon trading system
- Grabbing market share from your rivals by wooing customers with a better story
Whatever your motivation, you take the same bold action. Defying convention, you follow your maverick instincts and decide to take the EU’s new carbon reporting regulation seriously.
In a split-screen montage, your competitors pore over their well-thumbed Lobbying Playbooks while you read the text of the CSRD, watch basic carbon accounting videos, and talk to specialist commercial carbon accountants and consultants.
Many such consultants, competing for Fashion Boss Hero business, appear in a montage. The EU’s new rules have opened up a whole new market sector, and old and new accounting businesses are rushing to dominate it.
Another montage, but this time it’s just you. Fashion Boss Hero sits through slide decks and presentations, hacks through the EU and technical jargon undergrowth, and interrogates seductive AI-based solutions.
Storytellers can string out this build-up as long as they dare, but sooner or later, we get to this story’s pivotal bombshell.
Plot hole or plot twist?
The winners of your ‘beauty pageant’ for consultants, accountants and platforms pitching for your carbon reporting business, make their final pitch.
It’s bleeding-edge hi-tech. They simulate how their Large Language Model (LLM)-powered algorithms will handle the EU’s new carbon reporting requirements.
But you’ve heard enough AI snake oil claims to be sceptical. You keep challenging their methodologies, relentlessly forensic.
In a stunning denouement, you pose your killer question. Unlike the AI-merchant’s technobabble, a child could understand it:
How will you get the data from your suppliers?
Exchanging worried glances at each other, the pitching team try some more jargon and techno-babble, but fall silent when you say:
So you’re guessing, not using actual data from our supply chain, right?
You, they (and the breathless audience) suddenly realise that shiny new AI robots can’t solve this problem.
AI tools are programmed to come up with statistically plausible guesses, but that’s not good enough for Fashion Boss Hero, and may not satisfy any EU auditor.
AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. These robots only have vague generic approximations, and decades worth of greenwash slop, to learn from.
AI-generated answers might be plausible guesses, but they’re guesses. This is the financial equivalent of expecting the taxman to be happy with you documenting 20% of your costs, and to trust your gut on the other 80%.
In this T-Shirt’s Tale, you tell the accountants your fashion brand’s carbon footprint must be impeccable, the best in class. Your report must be a paragon of authentic transparency. You want your PR department to have something meaningful to publicise, in contrast to your rivals’ spurious ‘carbon-neutral’ claims that defy the laws of physics.
It’s not just for appearances, you tell the smirking guy in the back. ’If our supply chain’s carbon footprints aren’t measured accurately, how can we work out how to reduce our emissions?, you ask him. ‘If we apply the same generic, broad conversion factors your AI model suggests as ‘good enough’ estimates, how can we distinguish low-carbon suppliers from high-carbon suppliers?’.
‘How’, asks Fashion Boss Hero, with steely determination, ‘will we know how to reward the supplier that’s worked like hell to produce cotton at 15 kg of greenhouse gas per kilo, from the one that doesn’t give a damn, and produces it at 40kg?’.
The Low Point
You and the accountants (they’re not the bad guys in this story) brainstorm a solution.
Cue time-lapse of intense debate, poring over documents with highlighter pens, pizzas arriving in the boardroom, people staring at screens.
You hit snag after snag.
- ‘We can’t ask our suppliers to tell us how much of their revenue we provide. Why would they volunteer such commercially sensitive information to us if they don’t have to? Without that percentage, how can we assign the right proportion of their carbon footprint to our Scope 3?’.
- ‘The commercial carbon reporting standards hide their methodologies in a black box. We can’t tell if we’re comparing apples with oranges’.
- ‘The commercial carbon reporting services keep nearly all the detailed data private, or behind a pay wall. If we can’t evaluate them, how can we explain our footprint to the regulators’.
- ‘Even if all this was completely transparent and open, how will our small businesses suppliers going to be able to afford their fees? We can afford to pay specialist consultants. Our bigger suppliers might stretch to it too, but they’re not yet required to by law, so why should they pay to help us out? But the little guys definitely can’t afford commercial carbon footprint services, even if they wanted to cooperate. And we can’t pay for all the thousands of businesses in our supply chain’.
More debate, more documents, more screens, the hands on the clock show 4am.
Gradually activity stops. Spectacles are removed, eyes rubbed, heads shaken.
Flinging down a coffee-stained copy of the EU’s CSRD/CSDDD Omnibus Negotiating Mandate, an exhausted accountant despairs:
‘This is exactly what all our rival fashion brands have been whining to Brussels about. They all whine it’s far too expensive for them to pay for all the thousands of companies in their supply chain to have professional carbon footprint evaluations, with consistent methodology and standards. They say they’ve tried asking their SME suppliers for the data they need, but none wants to disclose it to them, because it means revealing how dependent they are on their big customers. They’re right. It’s impossible.’
All seems lost. Your brave efforts to do the right thing have been for nothing.
Good intentions, it seems, are not enough. In the real world.
One by one, the exhausted team packs up and leaves, until it’s just you and your Trusted Assistant, who inspired you to ‘save the planet for the sake of my grandkids’ (if you chose that motivation backstory).
You go over all the issues with your Trusted Assistant for the hundredth time.
She doesn’t appear to be listening, clicking around the internet with a thousand-yard-stare, but by now you’re mainly talking to yourself anyway.
‘Let’s think about this logically. If only there were some kind of database which all our suppliers, from the farmers to the garment makers, trust with their carbon footprint data.
They wouldn’t have to tell us how much their business we represent – they just share that information with the database, which then reports the aggregate total to us for our Scope 3. We need never know, so long as any regulators auditing it can access that information.
Of course it would have to be free for it to work. No way those Indian or Ugandan cotton farmers, or all those wholesalers, will be able to pay for this service, even if they know we’re more likely to use them if they do report their accurate carbon footprints…’
You tail off into silence.
But wait a minute…
Your Trusted Assistant turns out to have been listening after all.
For this climactic scene in the alternative ending of The T-Shirt’s Tale, we’ll switch to screenplay format.
SCENE: night-time interior boardroom. FASHION BOSS HERO gazes listlessly at the sun rising over the city. TRUSTED ASSISTANT is slumped at her laptop, idly clicking.
Suddenly, her eyes widen and she sits up straight.
TRUSTED ASSISTANT, a tremor in her voice: Have you heard of the ‘SME Paradox’?
FASHION BOSS HERO: Don’t think so. What is it?’
TRUSTED ASSISTANT (reading from her screen): ‘The SME Paradox is that big businesses, which are required to report accurate carbon footprints and can afford professional services to calculate their Scopes 1 and 2. But for Scope 3 they need data from small businesses in their supply chain, who have no such legal obligation and can’t afford professional services.’
FASHION BOSS HERO: Pithy. But a better problem statement of the problem isn’t a solution.
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: Would an ‘accurate, free, open source, transparent carbon reporting eco-system’ be a solution?
FASHION BOSS HERO: Let me think…how would it help?
TRUSTED ASSISTANT, reading from screen again: ‘A one-stop, comprehensive carbon reporting service that’s free to use, only requires carbon-related data, never asks for or stores any personal or financial information, and publishes its methodology, data and workings by default.’
FASHION BOSS HERO, after long pause: ‘If it’s open and transparent, it can update new methodologies and conversion factors as they become available, instead of hiding them in IP black boxes, or behind data paywalls. That would future-proof us to be compliant with any future carbon reporting regulations.
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: There’s more. ‘Your company’s dashboard shows at a glance the percentage of your supply chain supplying real information for your Scope 3 vs how much is estimated because your suppliers have not yet participated’.
FASHION BOSS HERO: Hmm. If everyone could see this data, it would prove to our customers, and to regulators, we’re not greenwashing.
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: We’d have to make our carbon footprint data public, using methodologies we can’t control.
FASHION BOSS HERO: But that’s what we do when we publish our financial annual report. Anyone can read that – what’s the difference?
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: Nothing, really. It just means anyone would tell whether our carbon footprint is growing or shrinking, like our revenue or profits.
FASHION BOSS HERO: The whole industry has been pretending we’re carbon neutral for years – no wonder no one trusts us any more. If it were published transparently by a neutral third party like this, people could trust the data.
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: What about the SMEs in our supply chain? Would they be OK with reporting their carbon footprints too, even when they’re not legally required to?
FASHION BOSS HERO: If they know big customers like us favour suppliers that do, they would! It would enable us to reduce our carbon footprint by monitoring the actual emissions from every link in our supply chain, and only using the lower-carbon ones. How long would it take them to report their data?
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: It says that because it’s only collecting carbon-related data, it might only take a few minutes for a small business to supply their data, or a couple of hours for a bigger company.
FASHION BOSS HERO: Quick, easy, free, no commercially sensitive information disclosed. That would solve the SME Paradox! But does such a carbon reporting ecosystem exist?’.
TRUSTED ASSISTANT, turns laptop towards FASHION BOSS HERO, revealing the See Through Carbon website.
FASHION BOSS HERO: But if it’s free, how do they make money?
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: They don’t. That’s why it’s an ecosystem.
FASHION BOSS HERO: But how can it work without money?
TRUSTED ASSISTANT: Ecosystems have different ways, like Linux, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and Wikipedia. It just requires people who want it to work.
FASHION BOSS HERO, pulling the laptop towards him: People like us.
FADE to caption: This story is not yet over.
***
If you like this alternative ending to The T-Shirt’s Tale
- Apply to participate in the Pilot at www.seethroughcarbon.org
- Email volunteer@seethroughcarbon.org to help make it happen
Whichever you choose, you’ll have the best story.