Zara parent Inditex has made an investment in sustainable agriculture, but some environmental activists say the fashion giant needs to do more to reduce its carbon footprint.
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Madrid-based Inditex —which also owns fashion brands such as Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius and Oysho—announced at its annual general meeting this week that it has invested in Boston-based sustainable agricultural startup Galy.
“Today, we are disclosing that we have entered the capital of Galy, a startup founded in 2019 in the U.S., which is developing an innovative process to produce cotton in laboratories from plant cells,” Inditex CEO Oscar Garcia Maceiras told shareholders during the meeting.
Galy, a 2020 winner of H&M’s Global Change Award , claims to identify ideal cotton plant cells and cultivate new populations in factory-scale bioreactors that provide the ideal environment for growth. The resulting material is processed into yarns, fabrics and finished products.
The investment plays into Inditex’s pledge to utilize 40 percent recycled fibers and 25 percent “next-generation” materials by 2030. The company also has committed to cutting its emissions in half by the end of the decade.
In 2022, Inditex invested in Virginia-based Circ , a textile-to-textile recycler. Galy, which was founded in 2019 by Luciano Bueno in Boston and also has an operation in Brazil, is a biotechnology firm that has developed technology for growing cotton in a lab from the plant’s stem cells.
But some environmental activists believe revamping its material portfolio isn’t enough to mitigate Inditex’s carbon impacts.
The Clean Clothes Campaign , Public Eye and other groups this week criticized the company’s practice of moving fast fashion via air freight , estimating that Inditex’s transportation-related carbon emissions increased by 37 percent in 2023 alone.
The groups and their allies produced a list of demands for Inditex shareholders, including being honest about the company’s carbon footprint and publishing data about its cargo flights and emissions.
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The activists also asked for a rapid and complete phase-out of airborne fashion and a redesign of logistics systems to eliminate climate-damaging flights. In addition, they said Inditex must work harder to adjust its business model to pay suppliers enough to cover the cost of sustainable production and living wages for workers.
In response, several Inditex shareholders called for increased transparency during the annual meeting. In particular, investors asked the company to publicly release its list of suppliers as competitors such as H&M have done. Barbara Setti of the European Shareholders for Change network and the Ethical Finance Foundation called on Inditex to release data on cargo flight emissions.
According to Maceiras, Inditex only transports products via air when no other option is available or efficient. During the meeting, he outlined other sustainability milestones, including using recycled and lower-impact fibers, and improving decarbonization and biodiversity throughout the supply chain.
The company has made other moves to improve its environmental performance, such as joining Canopy’s Pack4Good campaign, committing that trees from ancient and endangered forests don’t end up in Inditex ’s packaging, he said.
And while Inditex points to figures such as a 24-percent drop in air freight volume in 2022, the Clean Clothes Campaign and Public Eye point out that those numbers don’t tell a complete story.
“Inditex has simply picked the one year when it happened to transport smaller amounts of goods by air, which is probably due primarily to the disappearance of its important Russian business following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the activists said in a post on the Clean Clothes Campaign website.
“In fact, the long-term trend shows an ongoing increase,” the groups added. “In 2023, the transport-related emissions of greenhouse gases included in the Inditex annual report were 37 percent higher than the previous year and it is likely that air freight made up the majority of this.”
At nearly 2,000,000 tons of CO2-equivalents (CO2e), “the emissions have reached an all-time high,” they said.
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