Amazon is placing itself at the center of an effort to make sustainable fashion affordable, launching a new coalition through The Climate Pledge, the net-zero initiative the e-commerce giant co-founded in 2019. The Climate Pledge Fashion Coalition brings together more than 60 fashion brands, manufacturers, retailers, and material innovators, including Stella McCartney, Another Tomorrow, Brooks Running, Anna Sui, Selfridges, and Vestiaire Collective, with backing from the World Economic Forum and the forest-conservation nonprofit Canopy.
The coalition's central problem is economic. Low-carbon materials already exist, from recycled fibers to mushroom-based leather, but fashion brands often operate on thin margins and say they cannot afford to pay a premium for them. The startups producing those materials cannot lower prices until they reach scale, and they cannot reach scale without large orders. The coalition aims to aggregate demand across its members so suppliers can count on significant volume, while The Climate Pledge works to identify the most eco-friendly mills and spinners and help them scale quickly.
Members gain access to a new Fashion Coalition Lever Library, a database of more than 100 decarbonization solutions that includes guidance on how to use each fiber and a directory of suppliers. The coalition is also working with the World Economic Forum on financing models that pair financial institutions with private investors to fund promising materials. Sally Fouts, director of The Climate Pledge at Amazon, said the goal is cost parity with conventional materials, or even lower prices. «The goal is to bring the cost of those materials down so that the larger, lower-price-point manufacturers and fashion companies are able to also have access to these products,» she said. «That's the ultimate win.»
Fouts said the team chose fashion because it is a heavy emitter where existing sustainability coalitions have made limited progress, and because consumers have an intimate relationship with clothing. Other high-emitting sectors the Pledge works on, such as shipping, are not «an everyday thing that they put on their body and care deeply about,» she said. Peter Majeranowski, chief executive of the textile recycling company Circ, one of the coalition's material innovators, expressed optimism that the Pledge will meet its goal, pointing to Amazon's earlier work creating low-carbon cement and sending demand signals for Rivian by ordering electric vans.
Joining the coalition is free but carries commitments. Signatories must agree to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement, and to measure and report their emissions regularly while decarbonizing their own operations as much as possible. Companies that still cannot reach net-zero emissions are permitted to buy carbon offsets. Fouts said the coalition has «quite a bit of language around what qualifies as a credible offset.»
A notable gap remains. Most brands involved are higher-end labels, while the bulk of clothing sold today is cheap fast fashion, including much of what Amazon makes and sells through private-label lines such as Amazon Essentials. Fouts argues that lower-priced brands, which operate on even thinner margins, will join once costs fall. That logic makes sense, but it also leaves the biggest players without immediate pressure. Amazon has enormous purchasing power, and its private-label brands could serve as the anchor customer that makes these materials viable, yet its own apparel lines are not currently leading the shift to less carbon-intensive materials. Fouts said Amazon will look at incorporating new materials «where it makes sense,» as other coalition members will.
Even so, the coalition arrives at a moment when the broader sustainability movement has gone quiet. Fouts said she has observed firsthand that the 700 companies within Amazon's Climate Pledge are not slowing down, noting that climate investments play out over decades and much of the work has continued behind the scenes. «They're in the game, they're doing the work, they're making investments,» she said.