Sustainability in the Apparel Industry: A Study of the World’s Leading Ten Apparel Companies

The fashion industry generates wide range of damaging environmental and social impacts, including carbon dioxide emissions, the use of often scarce water resources, water and chemical pollution, waste disposal, and is associated with poor pay and working conditions, health and safety at work, human rights abuses and modern slavery. Not surprisingly, the industry faces growing criticism and scrutiny over the limited consideration it has given to these environmental and social issues. With this in mind, this chapter offers an exploratory, and illustrative, examination of how the world’s ten largest apparel companies have addressed sustainability, and offers some reflections on the images and accounts of sustainability presented by these companies, on the sustainability in the companies’ supply chains, and on the tensions between sustainability and economic growth.