Primark has been making significant progress toward ambitious sustainability goals — including cutting its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 — and the apparel retailer has the receipts to prove it. But improving sustainability, part of the retailer’s Primark Cares program, isn’t easy — particularly when business goals call for growth, including expanding the Primark store footprint from the current 445 locations globally to 530 stores by 2026.
Primark identified several key sustainability achievements over the past year, including:
- More than half (55%) of all clothes sold contained recycled or more sustainably sourced materials, up from 45% last year;
- 46% of cotton clothing sold contained cotton that was either organic, recycled or sourced from the Primark Sustainable Cotton Programme (PSCP), up from 40% last year;
- The PSCP marked its 10th year with almost 300,000 farmers trained in more sustainable farming methods;
- Adding repair workshops, with 100 held across the UK, Ireland, France and the Netherlands, to teach customers and associates how to repair and customize their clothes to extend the product lifecycle; and
- Receiving validation from the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) after it assessed Primark’s progress on halving its carbon emissions by 2030 (based on a 2019 baseline).
Addressing the Role of Suppliers’ Sustainability Profiles
Making this kind of progress requires involvement from a host of entities throughout the retail ecosystem, particularly in the supply chain. For retailers, “purchased goods and services are usually 95% or more of their carbon emissions,” said Joel Mertens, Director of Higg Product Tools at Cascale, formerly the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. Primark is a member of Cascale and has been using the Higg Index tools, along with other metrics, to track its progress.
“We’ve adopted the Higg Facilities Environmental Model (FEM) and invited suppliers that make up over 70% of our turnover to complete the assessment,” said a Primark spokesperson. “It’s a standardized industry-level framework to rank suppliers’ environmental performance, giving a score for areas including waste management, water, carbon, chemical use and others. We’re also running surveys on textile waste with a number of suppliers in key sourcing regions.”
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Using the Higg Index tools can help a company avoid “carbon tunnel vision,” said Mertens. “You don’t want to just focus on one thing. Instead, you can create an overview of all the impacted areas, see where you have the biggest opportunity for improvement, and then prioritize and track your progress.
Customer Education: Available but not Overwhelming
At the other end of the value chain, Primark has focused on customer education and awareness. “Communications plays a key element in making sustainability more accessible for our customers,” said the Primark spokesperson. Additionally, “educating our customers — given the millions and millions we have around the world — has to be one of the biggest opportunities we have to make a positive impact. We firmly believe it’s not enough to work to change the way we make and source our clothes, but that we have a responsibility to help our customers understand the issues, and what role the fashion industry, and Primark, can play.”
However, Primark “doesn’t want to overwhelm [customers], so we make information available in a number of ways,” according to the spokesperson. Product labels now include composition information, and there’s additional information available on the Primark website, via its social channels and through QR codes in its stores.
“In addition to offering more sustainable options in-store, we’re working to inspire our customers to love and wear their existing clothes for longer, by making them more durable and offering workshops and online tutorials on how to repair and re-wear their clothes,” said the spokesperson. “In Europe, we’ve launched a partnership with vintage concession WornWell to keep people wearing and loving clothing for longer.” Primark launched new durability and repair initiatives in March 2023.
Primark also is moving ahead with its business growth goals. In the U.S., the retailer operates 25 stores across 10 states, with plans to open new locations in Orlando, Fla. and its first Michigan store by September 2024. The brand’s ultimate American ambition is to operate 60 stores; toward that end, Primark opened its second U.S. distribution center, in Jacksonville, Fla., in February 2024.
