Over the last 20 years, global textile production has doubled. Along with this ballooning industry, its environmental impacts are facing increasing attention. The European Parliament Research Service estimates, based on data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), that producing just one cotton t-shirt consumes 2700 litres of freshwater and that clothing production is responsible for 20% of global water pollution, due to processes such as dyeing.
The fashion industry is responsible for a share of global emissions between 2 and 7% (for comparison, aviation emissions account for around 2.5%). However, in their advertising and public communication campaigns, fashion companies boast great focus on environmental issues – sustainable cotton, recycled fabrics, low-emission materials, and pre-loved garments.
Together with a team of media outlets in the European Data Journalism Network, led by Deutsche Welle, we evaluated 468 sustainability commitments from more than 200 reports by 17 of the biggest European fashion companies to understand how the industry fares on environmental targets.
The results show that most companies are pledging to lower emissions and adopt more sustainable materials – although often with vague targets and terminology – while many impacts of textile production, such as water use, biodiversity and animal welfare, are still not receiving enough attention. And while some companies have taken sufficient action to meet their stated commitments, much more work is needed to make sustainable fashion the norm.
Fashion companies achieve about half of their self-imposed sustainability goals
Most of the fashion industry's emissions come from the production of clothes: growing or extracting the materials needed to make fibres, spinning them into yarn, and producing and dyeing fabrics all use a lot of energy, and can release harmful substances into the environment. The garments' use and end of life also add to the industry's impacts: a 2017 study estimated that synthetic textile fibres - released during washing - make up 35% of all microplastics in the world's oceans; every year, EU citizens throw away 11 kg of clothes on average, and just 1% gets recycled into new garments.
In the last decade, fashion companies have promised to improve sustainable production and address pollution. Still, our analysis reveals that when it comes to following through on their commitments, companies perform very differently. Across all reports analysed, our collective research identified 468 commitments, of which around half have target dates through the end of 2025 or later. These included targets on emissions reductions, more sustainable materials, energy usage, waste management, and other issues. Overall, companies met about half of the total stated commitments with target dates that have expired. One in three commitments failed, with the rest unclear.
Zalando most often failed to meet its commitments, with 10 of its 17 targets unmet. The company fell short, for instance, of the target set in 2019 to "generate 25% of our Gross Merchandise Volume with more sustainable products by 2023", achieving only 10.5% according to its own reports.
Data on improvements on many pledges, however, can become increasingly hard to track and verify as the years go by, resulting in a large grey zone: the Spanish brand Mango, UK-based Primark and Italian OVS, for instance, leave a large share of their targets unclear, dropping or redefining parameters, with the consequence that consumers have little chance to verify achievements. Mango, for example, didn't follow up on its 2012 target to "eliminate hazardous substances throughout the supply chain" by 2020. OVS confirmed, on request, that the company had failed its 2017 target to "produce 3 million garments using fibres from fabrics collected from consumers" by 2020, but did not mention this in public reporting.
Brands vary significantly in the number of pledges they explicitly include in their reports. The eight luxury goods companies included in the analysis combined account for only around a third of the 468 total stated targets. H&M led the brands, with 49 stated commitments; Adidas was second, with 28.
Brands stay largely silent on their supply chain impacts
Data on the impacts of our clothing is often peppered with rough estimates: tracking greenhouse gas emissions along the industry's complex supply chain is often tricky because standards and regulations vary across different countries.
The environmental consequences of the fashion industry predominantly affect countries in the Global South, which are dealing with the production and end-of-life of clothing. Italy's fashion industry accounts for nearly half of Europe's sector profits; around 5% of Italy's GDP comes from fashion. But clothing made by Italian brands is increasingly produced in other countries, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and China.
Our analysis has found that fashion companies' pledges often omit impacts along the supply chain. While they may promise to "use 100% renewable energy" to power their stores in Europe, many remain silent on energy consumption, water use, and other environmental impacts in the countries where garments are produced.
However, some companies do address the difficulties of ensuring a sustainable supply chain in their sustainability reports. The Italian company OVS, for example, dedicates a specific section of its reports to its efforts to improve sustainability practices along the supply chain, detailing current challenges. In 2023, the company launched an energy-efficiency pilot project with some of its supply chain factories in Bangladesh and included supply chain decarbonisation targets among its pledges in 2024.
Attention on sustainability has grown in recent years
"Especially in the past decade, there have been reports exposing environmental and human rights abuses in the value chains of fashion brands", said Urska Trunk, senior campaign manager at the Brussels-based Changing Markets Foundation, which advocates for more comprehensive sustainability legislation.
"With the collapse of Rana Plaza, for instance, came a lot of investigations about how clothes are produced, about the chemicals, the toxicity, the deforestation and so forth", Trunk said, referring to the 2013 disaster that killed more than 1,100 people working in a structurally unsound garment factory for brands such as Zara, Primark and Benetton in Bangladesh. "As this evidence was piling up, consumers started demanding to know whether their clothes are made in a responsible way, both socially and environmentally".
While twenty years ago, sustainability was barely a footnote in the public communications of most fashion companies, with increased consumer awareness and technological progress, things have changed. Some companies, including H&M and the German brands Adidas and Puma, started sustainability reporting in the early 2000s, while others didn't begin until 2015 or later. Online retailer Zalando, founded in 2008, published its first sustainability strategy only in 2015, and luxury brands such as Armani and Chanel began even later.
Luxury brands remain silent on sustainability
"Luxury companies, traditionally, are very quiet", said Rachel Kitchin, senior climate campaigner for US-based advocacy organisation Stand.earth, which publishes the Fossil Free Fashion Scorecard every two years to rate companies' commitments and actions toward decarbonising fashion supply chains.
Because luxury companies don't have the same price constraints that might prevent mass-market retailers from investing heavily in overhauling supply chains, Kitchin said, high-end brands should arguably be sustainable by default. "But, if they're doing anything, they're not telling anyone. We suspect that that's because they share a lot of suppliers with nonluxury brands, and they don't want people to know that". Perhaps their usual customer base exerts less pressure in this sense.
Sustainability reports by Italian luxury brands like Armani and Salvatore Ferragamo list significantly fewer environmental pledges than those of fast-fashion or sports brands like H&M and Adidas. While their communications often highlight sustainability, single initiatives or projects are frequently presented as bright examples of the companies' green approach: efforts towards environmentally friendly production seem to be more a matter of storytelling than one of hard data.
Who committed to sustainable cotton
The effort to adopt sustainable materials is the single issue that most often racks pledges, according to our analysis. First of all: sustainable cotton. Cotton is a thirsty crop, and, in addition to the large amount of water used, conventional farming has a long track record of heavy use of pesticides and fertilisers, and exploitative labour practices.
H&M, whose range uses more cotton than any other material, made its first tentative steps into using "organic cotton" more than two decades ago. The company's first commitment was 20 metric tons across its whole range by 2005. In 2010, it had already surpassed the 15,000-ton target by 2013. By 2020, H&M had reached its goal of phasing out conventional cotton entirely.
Adidas and H&M were among the first major European fashion companies to successfully commit to sourcing all their cotton from more sustainable sources, and to join programs aimed at developing standards for what "more sustainable" means in practice, such as the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI).
Though advocates argue that certifications such as the BCI's should be more stringent, many brands fail to meet even this minimal standard.
The false promise of recycled polyester
Few brands, however, have committed to phasing out their most problematic primary production material: plastics. Synthetic fibres account for 69% of global fibre production across all applications in 2024. Though many companies promise to use "more sustainable materials", these can include questionable fabrics such as recycled polyester.
"Almost all recycled polyester today is made from plastic bottles and not old clothes", said Urska Trunk of Changing Markets Foundation. "That's not a sustainable solution because we already have a system in place where bottles can be continuously recycled back to bottles. But, once you make a shirt or a skirt out of the bottle, it can never be recycled again".
In the absence of market-ready technology that makes it possible to recycle old clothes into new clothes, she said, these kinds of promises are little more than a fig leaf for companies to cover up their reliance on materials made from fossil fuels.
Vague language, no deadlines: half of all pledges leave room for interpretation
Among the 468 claims included in the analysis, half are phrased quite specifically, including clear definitions of what is to be achieved and by when – for example, "Ensure that at least half of all plastic packaging is made from 100% recycled material by 2030".
Primark and Hermès are the companies with the highest share of vague or potentially ambiguous pledges. For instance, in 2024, Hermès promised "conduct at least two studies per year with academic partners on biodiversity issues until the end of 2026" — leaving much room for interpretation on whom they consider "academic partners" and what constitutes a "biodiversity issue".
Stand.earth has found such ambiguous promises to be common, Kitchin said: "Most companies have taken that first step of setting a target but really stopped there. If there is a target, but no information on how they will meet that target, then we consider that to be a flag for greenwashing".
According to a study by the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum on the Italian fashion industry, despite improvements in sustainability practices, fashion companies tend to overestimate their own positioning and still work within a "compliance-only framework". Recent improvements in emissions and water use have not been matched by improvements in raw materials and biodiversity, suggesting that "Italian companies chose to prioritise short-term measurable progress over more complex, long-term challenges".
Sustainability reporting and self-regulation
According to Urska Trunk of Changing Markets Foundation, a major issue is the lack of oversight in the past years. "It's been a kind of Wild West", Trunk said. "Brands could say what they want to say, they didn't have to back it up with evidence". With increased consumer awareness, various organisations have begun working directly with companies to implement sustainability standards and oversee their voluntary commitments.
"Voluntary business action is absolutely essential", said Jules Lennon, strategy lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. "But our work has shown that it only gets you so far. It needs to be bolstered by ambitious binding policy measures".
However, the recent proposal to simplify the European Union'S Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which took effect in 2024 and requires companies above a specific size to disclose information about their resource use, climate impacts, and sustainability actions in a standardised format, might slow down the progress on sustainable fashion.
Though Adidas, LVMH, Hermès and other companies have already prepared their 2024 reports in accordance with the directive, the European Commission decided in early 2025 to postpone its implementation and change the CSRD's scope to exempt many smaller companies from the requirements.
The Green Claims Directive, another piece of EU legislation aimed at tackling greenwashing, currently hangs in the balance after pushback from the conservative European People's Party.
Though legislation may still be delayed or amended, discussions have moved from whether the fashion industry should be regulated at all to how it should be done. Changing Markets' Urska Trunk said the progress was clear. "Brands have quietly dropped their most misleading claims", she said. "Consumers are more aware and are asking for accurate information – and companies are aware that they might face consequences if they don't back up their claims with evidence".
This investigation is a collaboration among several media outlets in the European Data Journalism Network in the context of Chat Europe. Data collection and analysis lead: Deutsche Welle. Contributing partners: El Orden Mundial, The Journal Investigates and Voxeurop.
All portrayed companies were contacted for comment ahead of publication and asked for clarification on any pledges labelled unclear. Any replies are logged in our database, and amendments were made before publication where necessary.
For data and methodology behind this analysis, see this GitHub repository.
