Bryony Moore
In Ethical Consumer's latest product guide to clothing , which ranks 25 high street clothing brands on how ethical their practices are, M&S came top of the table. Zara and H&M come second and third respectively, with Asda at the bottom with a score of 0.5 out of 20, followed by Bonmarche with 1.5. But what do these rankings really mean?
The scores on Ethical Consumer's product guides are compiled from ethical ratings using data in the public domain, including from civil society publications and company sustainability reports. The ratings cover around 300 topics in 19 areas in five main categories; animals, environment, people, politics and product sustainability. The database, which is updated daily, is a result of more than 20 years' work conducting primary and secondary research and systematically organising it using our ratings system.
Due to the number of clothing companies in Ethical Consumer's product guide, it separated the specialist ethical clothing brands from the mainstream high street names. The reality is that had they all been rated together, M&S would have emerged firmly in the middle of the table.
Empty promises
Ethical Consumer's supply chain management ratings show that the majority of companies perform better in the code of conduct assessment, which looks at the company's stated policy on working conditions, than in the implementation assessment, which covers engagement with stakeholders such as workers' rights NGOs, auditing transparency and reporting, and actively working to address difficult supply chain issues on the ground.
M&S is one of only a handful of companies to take action on the issue of forced labour in Uzbek cotton fields. In research published by the Responsible Sourcing Network, the company comes second-highest for the practical steps it has taken to remove Uzbek cotton from its supply chain. In the report, which rates companies on actions taken beyond signing a petition to ban Uzbek cotton, only five companies scored above 50 (out of 100).
M&S is also working on phasing out toxic water pollution from garment production. In its Detox Catwalk, Greenpeace named the retailer as a leader (pdf), among 13 other brands including Mango, H&M and Puma, for ensuring the publication of data on the discharge of hazardous chemicals by its individual suppliers on the global online platform IPE.
The Greenpeace campaign has seen several brands sign up to phase toxic chemicals out of textiles, but not all have taken actions to remove toxics from their supply chain. Greenpeace has conducted research on which companies are acting and published a list of leaders, green washers and laggards, acknowledging that a lot more remains to be done to achieve a toxic-free supply chain by 2020.
While other companies appear to make empty promises, M&S is genuinely ahead of its competitors by engaging with some of the biggest ethical and environmental issues facing the clothing industry today.
A long way to the finish line
There is plenty more work to be done. M&S scores in the lower category on the Clean Clothes campaign report, Tailored Wages, , which looks at efforts made by companies to pay a living wage to workers at supplier factories. It could also improve on areas in its supply chain management assessment – for example, by improving audit transparency and increasing stakeholder engagement in the management process.
Ranked against other high street brands M&S top the table, but pitted against companies on the ethical clothing table, it would be bottom of the league.
Virtually all the small ethical clothing companies exist in order to make the world a better place, something hard for a multi-national profit-maker to claim. So why has Ethical Consumer publicly endorsed M&S?
Love them as we do, there's only so far you can go when endorsing small, but perfectly ethical clothes companies. They are the unsung heroes of the clothing product guide, but they have a small customer base and their impact on the multi-billion dollar clothing industry as a whole is tiny.
On the other hand as a huge global company, M&S has the leverage and purchasing power to potentially have a major influence on the mainstream fashion industry. Crucially, it can help raise the ethical and environmental bar.
There's now a demand from shoppers wanting to know what ethical clothing choices are available on the high street. For the past 10 years, most clothing campaigners have held the line that all mainstream clothing companies are as bad as each other and should be avoided at all costs. This position discourages those companies that are spending serious money trying to improve their ethical performance from making further investments.
We believe there comes a time when you have to acknowledge that while there are still problems to be resolved, there's now a real difference in performance between the best and worst clothing companies, and by shopping with the best you are rewarding a company that is moving in the right direction towards a more sustainable clothing industry.
The likes of M&S, Zara, H&M, Asda and Bonmarche have as big a role to play as campaigners in forcing change upon the global clothing industry. For mainstream shoppers, it's simply no longer tenable to suggest that all high street clothing companies are the same – they're not.
Bryony Moore is Ethical Consumer's lead clothing researcher.
The sustainable fashion hub is funded by H&M. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.
