Patagonia, Inc. makes outdoor clothing and is committed to the environment. The Ventura, Calif.-based company was founded in 1973 and has operated in at least 10 countries worldwide; it has factories in 16 countries. Since 1985, the company has given 1% of its profits to environmental causes.

The company says its mission is tied to the products it sells: the enterprise profits from marketing outdoor clothing. Patagonia is committed to organic materials and running all its operations using renewable energy. Indeed, the apparel industry is responsible for 6.7% of the globe’s greenhouse gases. It releases as much as 3.29 billion tons of CO2 equivalents annually, according to Quantis.

“We’re already at 100% renewable energy for our owned and operated stores, offices, and distribution centers, but the real challenge comes from materials manufacturing, which accounts for 95% of our emissions,” says Patagonia’s corporate responsibility statement.

In 1996, Patagonia switched to using only organically-grown cotton. Cotton is the world’s most widely used fiber, and organically-grown cotton is a small subset of that. According to Vesti la Natura, organic cotton excludes pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and 1000 other toxic substances harmful to the environment and human health.

 — eliminating virgin petroleum fiber in its products and using only preferred materials such as organic cotton, hemp, recycled polyester, and recycled nylon by 2025. It is 87% of the way there.

 “Since Fall 2019, (the company has) helped keep 14.6 million pounds of CO? out of the atmosphere when compared to their virgin counterparts,” says its environmental statement. “That’s like planting 109,000 tree seedlings.”

 — switching to 100% reusable, home compostable, renewable, or easily recyclable packaging by 2025.

 — achieving net zero across its entire business by 2025. To that end, it says that purchasing offsets — buying carbon credits to allow it to reach carbon neutrality, is not its default position. Rather, it says that 95% of its emissions are tied to its supply chain and materials manufacturing. That will be its focus.

Protecting the nation’s public lands and waters is one of the company’s highest priorities. It says that 24% of all US-generated CO2 is the result of producing fossil fuels on federal lands and offshore waters. That’s why it zeroes-in on land and water.

Reach its net-zero goals is an urgent matter. Patagonia says that its supply chain — defined as getting its products from raw materials to finished gear for sale — makes up 97% of its carbon emissions. It aims to be carbon neutral by 2025. After that, it wants to be carbon positive, taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it puts into it. How?

 — using only renewable or recycled materials in its products by 2025. In 2018, 52% of its materials by weight were renewable or recycled. And in 2019, it was 69%. It says 169,944 pounds of old Patagonia garments were responsibly recycled in 2021.

 — reducing energy usage throughout its supply chain by deploying energy efficient technologies.

 — expanding its use of organic agriculture for its apparel business and restoring topsoil — a tool that helps its reforestation efforts. Patagonia started pilot programs to promote organic cotton suppliers in India in 2018 and included 150 small farmers there.

 — going fully renewable worldwide. Right now, 82% of the electricity use at its globally owned and operated facilities come from  renewables. It aims to get to 100% this year. For example, it installed 679 Kilowatts of solar energy on farmland in Japan, while it produced 555,200-kilowatt hours from the solar arrays at its Ventura Campus. Meanwhile, it generated 3,900,000 kilowatt hours from the solar arrays at its Reno Distribution Center and office buildings.

In 2018, Patagonia rolled out a program to eliminate waste in its business operations.

“We are moving toward becoming a zero-waste-to-landfill organization through our own operations—which means all discards from our offices, distribution centers and stores will either have to be reused, recycled, donated, composted, or upcycled,” the sustainability statement says.

“To do so, we will have to change many of our operations, purchasing practices and behaviors to make sure anything leaving our footprint heads to a recycling or compost stream,” it continues. “With the current fluctuating state of recycling globally, this is becoming a more daunting task.”

It says recyclers no longer accept many items that used to be refurbished, mainly because much of it was comingled with trash and ended up in landfills anyway. While this makes the company’s goal more daunting, it has led to creative solutions.

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