Cheers erupt. The emblem of the world’s sustainable fashion industry walks onto the stage. In front of hundreds of consultants, executives of competing brands, and sustainability managers, the CEO of outdoor brand Patagonia shows off initiatives his firm has taken to make the production of his clothes greener.

Increased use of responsible materials, fair trade certification, and giving away their profits to an NGO dedicated to fighting the climate crisis – all things Patagonia has done, Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert says.

It’s the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen in May 2024, and Gellert is being interviewed on stage.

Patagonia's greatest value, Gellert tells the interviewer, lies in the “more responsible form of business” that the company is developing. “That's what we spend all of our time trying to do,” he said.

“Wow,” responds the interviewer.

She doesn’t ask critical questions – about working conditions in garment factories in Sri Lanka, for instance. 

When Gellert leaves the stage after 20 minutes, the applause is even louder than when he came on.

Patagonia has long decried what they call greenwashing by other companies: “The world’s largest clothing brands hide dirty, irresponsible practices and misuse words like ‘sustainable,’ ‘green’ and ‘conscious.’,” the company writes on its website. 

But behind that glitzy appearance of environmental consciousness, Patagonia is hiding some uncomfortable truth: The brand often opts for the most polluting way of shipping its clothes to Europe and the United States – and does so more often than other brands like H&M or Primark. 

47 times more emissions  

A package of 1,158 fleece jackets arrives in the Netherlands in mid-August 2023. They are sporty, water-repellent jackets with a thin lining and the Patagonia logo – a purple-blue mountain – sewn on the left chest pocket. They are designed to keep out the cold and are suitable for mountaineers, but in European capitals this type of jacket is also very popular with consultants, lawyers and schoolchildren. 

The whole process seems tailored to sustainability: the jackets are made from recycled polyester in a fair-trade factory in Vietnam; the factory gets an extra amount for each garment made, and workers can decide what this is spent on.

But that’s where, apparently, the sustainability promise of Patagonia stops: instead of sending it with the more environmentally friendly, but slower boat, it exports the jackets by plane.

A 480-gram coat travelling by plane from Vietnam to the Netherlands causes about 47 times more greenhouse gases to be emitted during its journey than the same coat coming to the Netherlands by cargo ship, FTM’s calculations show. 

That has an effect on the companies’ overall emissions. 

Simon Kew, author of The Path to Net Zero for the Fashion Industry, argues that sea freight accounts for less than 1 per cent to the carbon footprint of fashion products. 

However, if a garment comes to consumers by air, that share rises to as much as 40 per cent, he found. That leads Kew to a simple conclusion: just don't do it.

“[Air freight] is the type of activity that should be outright banned by fashion brands or by regulators,” he wrote in his book.

Still, Patagonia opts for the plane for about 5 per cent of its clothing, customs declarations from suppliers show: last year, Patagonia shipped its clothes on more than 1,300 flights from Patagonia's main manufacturing countries Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to markets in Europe and the United States, according to the data.

Patagonia uses the plane relatively more often than fast-fashion brands H&M and Primark, which have 3 and 2 per cent of their products transported by plane, respectively. And other sports brands like Nike, Puma and Adidas all stay below 1 per cent, Follow the Money’s analysis shows.

Researcher David Hachfeld, who investigates the flight movements of the fashion industry on behalf of the NGO Public Eye , sees “no plausible explanation” for Patagonia's use of air traffic. 

“Exceptionally, there's strange things happening in the supply chain, a port that is closed or a road that is blocked. But 1,300 flights a year, that is no exception,” he told Follow the Money. “While five per cent may not sound like much, it is significant given the extremely heavy climate impact of air cargo.”

There are also sizable outliers upwards. Popular yoga brand Lululemon, for instance, uses the plane for 42 per cent of its transport.

While other interventions, such as the use of recycled materials, require a whole new production process – design, collection, recycling – to make it more sustainable, in this case companies could opt to simply book a ship instead of a cargo plane. 

Sea freight takes five to seven weeks for transporting the goods instead of one to five days – and it’s because of this that the company is opting for that mode of transport. 

“Exceptionally, there's strange things happening in the supply chain, a port that is closed or a road that is blocked. But 1,300 flights a year, that is no exception”

“Our production timelines are planned so that all finished goods should be transported to us via land and water, rather than air. Very occasionally there are unavoidable delays or issues in manufacture that mean we consider air freight as a last-resort option,” a spokesperson said. “We only use air transport in exceptional circumstances, where avoiding it would create unused product.”

The spokesperson declined to explain why a seven weeks' delay would result in “unused products.” Patagonia itself labels its products as “timeless” and “made to last years” – “not seasons.”

More and more air freight 

That even a sustainable fashion brand like Patagonia doesn't manage to avoid the plane bodes poorly for where the fashion industry is heading.

Ultrafast fashion and disposable clothing are dominating the market, with aircraft playing a crucial role and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. 

In 2023, Europe imported 25 million tonnes of clothing, textiles and shoes, data by the European Union's statistics office Eurostat show. Of that, 3 per cent – some 690,000 tonnes – came by plane. That's almost 7,000 planes or 20 cargo flights a day full of clothes and shoes. 

In those statistics, the two biggest air carriers are missing: Chinese newcomers Shein, which in a few years has become the world's biggest fast-fashion brand, and competitor Temu, which in addition to clothes also offers cheap electronics and home furnishings, among others.

Unlike conventional fashion brands, which first ship their products to distribution centres to be sent to physical shops or consumers from there, Shein and Temu send their products from the production site directly to consumers. 

As they are small packages containing a few pieces of clothing, they don't always turn up in the data – but they do come this way by plane. According to news agency Reuters, Shein uses roughly 5,000 tonnes of air cargo capacity per day worldwide and Temu 4,000 tonnes. That amounts to 90 flights a day, assuming an average load capacity of about 100 tonnes per flight. 

Overall, the fashion industry accounted for some 11 per cent of cargo flights to the European Union in 2023, an analysis of Eurostat data shows. 

Back in Copenhagen, Patagonia’s Gellert said humans were responsible for solving man-made problems.  

When asked how companies can accelerate the sustainability transition in the fashion industry, he said: “We have the solutions, we know everything we need to know. … We don't have the will and that's what's gotta change.”