GBB Zero Issue

It’s a Wrap for Plastic

In 2007 BBC2’s Horizon programme sparked a shopping frenzy after it put No 7 Protect & Perfect beauty serum to the test. The results were a resounding vote in the product’s favour. It was proven to rejuvenate skin and beat wrinkles at a fraction of the cost of higher-end skincare products, causing countless shoppers to swap out their luxury favourites for a Boots-owned gem.

The demand was such that the serum sold out online the night the programme aired, and in-store supplies were gone in a matter of days. Production grew from 10,000 bottles manufactured in the months preceding the Horizon feature to 24,000 bottles each day afterwards. The response proved that true selling power lies in the product itself, not the brand it sits under. And this is a key lesson for luxury brands to learn.

For years luxury labels have made sales through aspiration. Their advertising and packaging cultivate an identity for shoppers to strive for, with products that have an iconic look and feel. Product boxes are weightier, more attractively detailed and highly finished than those of budget brands, aiming to give consumers a seductive unwrapping experience.

The result is an entirely warped value placed on what the product comes packaged in, sometimes even outweighing the value of the product itself. For decades, Tiffany blue and Hermès orange boxes have taken pride of place on dressing tables around the world, while the jewellery and accessories they contain are swapped out for new-season favourites. Empty Rolex boxes have been known to sell for as much as £160, and Louis Vuitton-branded carrier bags for £69. Luxury packaging has historically been used as a statement of buying power, with willing consumers. But our values are changing and this is soon to be relinquished as a statement of a bygone era.

Sardines (Photographer & Art Director: Elisabeth Hoff / Talent: Genevieve Chenneour @genevievechenneour / Hair: Michael Douglas @mdlondon / Makeup: Afton @aftonmakeup)

With the environmental crisis at the top of the global agenda, what was once aspirational is now viewed as wasteful. Fast fashion and linear consumption are under fire and the spotlight on packaging is shining harsher than ever. Luxury brands are not above this – the over-use of plastic in the food industry has been well-documented; cosmetics, fashion and accessories are next.

The beauty and cosmetics industry alone contributes some 120 billion units of packaging each year, all predominantly made of plastic. More than 100 billion plastic sachets are used to package up samples of products, just to drive sales. The fashion industry packages garments for delivery to homes and shops in plastic polybags, billions of which are used once and thrown out. Almost every bag, box, bottle and sachet is destined for landfill or incineration, each affecting our environment. Yesterday, packaging equalled luxury. Today, packaging equals waste.

According to recent government research, eight out of ten UK consumers are now actively making efforts to reduce their plastic use, while half are willing to pay more for eco-friendly packaging. In the case of luxury packaging, one in five consumers believes environmental credentials will be one of their top considerations when buying luxury items in ten years’ time.

Luxury labels that continue to ignore this sustainable direction, clearly signposted for some years now, will find their growth predictions deeply flawed. While a sumptuous box was once positive reinforcement of a brand’s value, it will soon signal a failure to adapt. It’s an open goal for brands willing to innovate and take plastics and packaging out of the equation.

Many ideas are already proven, such as refill schemes using infinitely recyclable aluminium bottles or jars – one of the most impactful ways personal care companies can reduce their packaging footprint. This does away with single-use, but still allows brands to stamp their identity on a sustainable bottle, so as not to be left out of the all-important Instagram ‘shelfie’.

Examples include L’Occitane, which launched its first refill scheme in 2008. UpCircle skincare was founded with a waste-free ethos of ‘return, refill, reuse’ and is shaking up the market by placing the environment at its heart. Beauty Kitchen operates a recycle system in which packaging is washed and refilled. Lush was a pioneer of package-free products and Neal’s Yard is encouraging customers to bring containers back for refills, with the incentive of discounts on future purchases.

It’s not only smaller brands making a change. In January this year Unilever launched its first-ever refillable deodorant for the popular personal care brand, Dove. Designed to last a lifetime, the initiative tackles our throwaway lifestyles and the global plastic waste crisis. By reimagining the product with a smooth, stainless- steel case Unilever wants to elevate user experience while aiming to cut 300 tonnes of its virgin plastic use by 2023.

Jelly Fish (Photographer & Art Director: Elisabeth Hoff / Talent: Genevieve Chenneour @genevievechenneour / Hair: Michael Douglas @mdlondon / Makeup: Afton @aftonmakeup)

Fashion house Burberry is also making efforts to reduce its environmental impact. In a bid to tackle plastic use it recently launched new paper packaging using FSC-certified paper from recycled coffee cups. The result has a high quality, expensive feel that oozes class and resonates with the brand’s luxury heritage. Crucially, it gives consumers a crème de la crème experience that’s not at the expense of the planet.

Meanwhile, the iconic green carrier bag from Harrods has had a makeover after remaining unchanged for 50 years. The world’s most famous department store has forsaken the traditional plastic design, replacing it with 100 per cent recyclable and sustainably-sourced paper carrier bags. Harrods is also looking to reduce the overall number of bags leaving its stores each year, with the mindset that switching to more sustainable materials is simply not enough in the battle against waste. Their thinking is that when boxes and bags are truly necessary to protect and/ or carry purchases home from the store, plastic-free paper or cardboard can be substituted for plastic. Otherwise they’re surplus to requirements.

And calling unnecessary packaging a ‘keep box’ or a ‘reusable bag’ doesn’t make it sustainable. There are only so many uses you can find for a box, and only so many times a bag will actually be reused before it joins the others stuffed under the sink and eventually thrown out.

In the end, packaging is just that: a covering for the main event. Since that 2007 flurry to buy the No 7 Protect & Perfect beauty serum showed the true value consumers place on a functional product over its brand, the message has taken on a whole new importance – one that blazes in the light of the current waste crisis.

Up to now, most luxury brands have fiercely protected their business practices as a key part of their traditional identity, but the new age of eco-innovation demands an about-turn. They need to show fearlessness and an ability to change. If we are to meet the plastic crisis head-on, brands must define themselves according to their product, not their packaging. The most iconic names in fashion and beauty must tear up the old rule book and elevate the meaning of luxury to one that meets the aspirations of the buyers of tomorrow – where minimal environmental impact will reign supreme.

Those who rise to the challenge will future-proof themselves for years to come. Those that don’t will see their once prestigious stock fall dramatically.

Sian Sutherland is co-founder of global solutions organisation, A Plastic Planet, which works with brands and governments to ‘turn off the plastic tap’.

Drowning in Plastic

‘We have a global plastic pollution problem, so I felt inspired to do something that might make a difference. This shoot ‘Drowning In Plastic’ was my attempt as a fashion and beauty photographer to do ‘a beautiful take on a dirty subject’. These images focus on a model swimming through water – either surrounded by, or entangled in single use plastic items. In some of the images the pollutants’ appearance changes, to almost become the representation of the wildlife it might replace. The aim was to make the viewer do a double take. This problem is very real. If we do not change the way we use this non-disposable substance in a disposable way, the above prediction will become a fact. Plastic is killing our seas.’ – Elisabeth Hoff, Photographer and Art Director.

Photographer & Art Director: Elisabeth Hoff / Talent: Genevieve Chenneour @genevievechenneour / Hair: Michael Douglas @mdlondon / Makeup: Afton @aftonmakeup

A Guide to Refill Stores

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GBB ZERO Fashion

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GBB Zero Issue  

Luxury Is Dead. Long Live Luxury.

‘So, the world is on fire – and you sell designer shoes at £800 a pair. What exactly is the point of you?’

This was the challenge I put to the full staff of a luxury footwear brand one afternoon a few years ago, a day the news was dominated with stories of Californian wildfires that had turned much of the state into a vision of hell. The scale of the fires was unprecedented, but no longer. We now grimly accept that much of the world is a tinderbox, just one indicator of our broken relationship with our fragile home.

There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. I let it play out. What, I pressed on, was the point of selling footwear that only the most financially privileged could afford (but certainly didn’t need) in the context of the climate emergency, not to mention a world riven with unconscionable levels of inequality? The silence grew in power, as those in attendance looked down at their (no doubt expensive) shoes, shuffled uncomfortably… and offered nothing.

No one had an answer to my challenge, so I relieved them of their gilded misery and told them how they could find relevance and regain a sense of worth in their work – but we’ll come to that later.

The recent IPCC report tells us that changes observed in the climate ‘are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years’ with and some (including the sea level rise baked into the system) ‘irreversible’. These changes are due to a 1.1°C temperature rise since the industrial revolution, and the direct result human activity. The work we do and the way we consume makes nearly all of us complicit in perpetuating intertwined economic and governance systems that have created this disaster. And most of us, including CEOs and politicians, feel powerless in the face of the embedded status quo.

That complicity and helplessness are a large part of why, according to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace research programme, between 70 and 80 per cent of employees globally feel disengaged from their work. As the corporate world’s sluggish enlightenment creeps forward, everyone from CEOs to the shop-floor employees tell me that their salaries have now become as much bribery to perpetuate the disaster as they are reward for the (damaging) work done. Those horrific engagement stats are also a proxy for a whole host of mental health problems. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that when your work and your values are at odds you’re going to suffer. This is bad for everyone. Dan Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us puts it well: ‘when the profit becomes unmoored from purpose bad things happen – bad things ethically, but also crappy products, lame services [and] uninspiring places to work’. There’s a huge productivity dividend going begging. Imagine what a genuinely engaged workforce would do for the economy.

Illustration by Aase Hopstock

But there is hope. Covid has given many of us a new lens on the world. As the skies quietened and the air cleared, we began to take stock of our careers and priorities. We witnessed how, when people only buy what they need the economy collapses and wondered, ‘does that make sense?’ We looked anew at the keyworkers who keep our nation going, seeing how they are the most valuable to society, even though we reward them the least – and we felt guilty about it, as we should. We saw how selfish individualism looked ridiculous and unseemly in the face of our communities coming together in the service of one another. We realised that all the money in the world is a poor substitute for an embrace, or even a handshake and that no earthly reward can compensate us for being absent from the bedside of a dying loved one, or the inability to hold each other up at a funeral. Perhaps, most importantly, many of us came to understand that the pandemic was not a random accident, but a symptom, in part, of our damaged relationship with the natural world, and that by association Covid was an ‘amuse-bouche catastrophe’. The main dish, climate change, became larger, not smaller, in our minds. In short, everyone on the planet has been given a lesson in systems, interconnectedness and interdependence. As the pioneering environmentalist John Muir put it, we found out that ‘when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe’.

For luxury brands, selling the concept of exclusivity and opulence, this collective catharsis brings challenges. In a Covid- and climate-changed world almost all the brands in this publication (particularly in light of some of their historical actions) have a problem they cannot ignore. In the wider context of environmental collapse and societal injustice their offerings, if unchanged, look far less like badges of personal success and much more like symbols of our collective failure. If they wish to embody the age’s aspirations, they cannot avoid radical change.

What now?

So, what now for the luxury market? What should the assembled brands in this publication do? How do they re-invent themselves to be relevant in the future we face for, as Philip K. Dick once famously put it, “’Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’.

The way forward seems obvious. Luxury brands have always sold themselves on the promise of being the best, the most aspirational, the finest of the fine. In the world we’re all having to build together now, that promise must also mean being the most regenerative and ethical. Luxury brands can and must redefine aspiration. The finest products should, by definition, be good for the planet. Indeed, in the future I believe it will be seen as perverse that we ever thought otherwise. This was the message I delivered to those purveyors of fancy footwear.

The good news is a regenerative agenda is good for you. The research bears it out time and time again. ‘High sustainability companies significantly outperform their counterparts over the long-term, both in terms of stock market as well as accounting performance.’[1] Why? Because such companies live in the real world, they look outwards, and therefore manage risk better. They reduce their own costs by tackling waste and inefficiency. And they have engaged employees whose productivity dwarfs that of less ethical competitors.

But if the carrot doesn’t convince you, perhaps the stick will. The UK has a legally binding Net Zero target for 2050, to be enforced by the Office for Environmental Protection. The courts have already shown their willingness to intervene, one example being the Court of Appeal’s ruling that the government’s policy statement in favour of Heathrow expansion was unlawful, in the light of its climate commitments. Ask yourself: do you think a UK government (of any flavour) is going to let business off the hook when it comes to meeting the national target? For organisations over a certain size, reporting on emissions is already a legal requirement. It won’t be long before reducing those emissions (and permanently removing what is left) will also be mandated by law. It therefore makes cold hard commercial sense to get ahead of that legislation and clean up your act (and see your less enlightened competitors flounder when the laws do pass). Here’s another idea being discussed by certain governments: reduced corporation tax for businesses that advance the UN sustainable development goals (and by the same token, higher bills for those that do not). You know what to do.

Actions luxury brands can take now to stay relevant:

1. Join the ‘Race To Zero’, the UN-backed global campaign helping companies, cities, regions, financial and educational institutions “take rigorous and immediate action to halve global emissions by 2030 and deliver a healthier, fairer zero carbon world in time.
2. Appoint a Chief Climate Officer to the board with the same standing and power as every other C-suite executive.
3. Commit to permanently removing from the atmosphere the emissions you cannot mitigate. This is neither paying someone else not to pollute, nor planting trees that will take years to sequester the carbon you’ve already emitted (if they survive). You cannot ‘offset’ your responsibilities. Instead find the suppliers who can offer verified and permanent ways to remove your emissions and help build the removals market, as enlightened companies like Shopify and Stripe are. Without a permanent removal industry we are all toast.
4. Understand that this is your moment to do something fantastic and life affirming. You have the privilege of being alive as we face humanity’s greatest crisis and the ability to do something about it. If, as John Muir said, everything is ‘hitched to everything else’ that means you are connected to everything around you. What you do ripples out across time and space and in this moment of crisis it matters whom you choose to be. To quote the great Jane Goodall, ‘What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.’

Mark Stevenson is a futurist, award-winning author, speaker, advisor and board member helping governments, corporates and third sector clients think beyond this world to better the one we build next

[1] Harvard Business School, ‘The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance’ – Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim,

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Mission Possible: Making Fashion Sustainable

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GBB Zero Issue

Mission Possible: Making Fashion Sustainable

Let’s not sugar coat this: we know we are in the throes of a dual climate and nature crisis. This summer the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, warned the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) represented a ‘code red for humanity’.

The fashion industry bears more than a little responsibility. After all, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to be up to 10 per cent of the global total; the sector is one of the top ten polluting industries on Earth; northwards of 100 billion garments are produced each year from virgin resources; 87 per cent of clothing material is incinerated, consigned to landfills or dumped in the natural environment and we buy 60 per cent more clothes than 15 years ago, wearing them for half as long. According to analysis by the campaigning NGO, Changing Markets, synthetic fibres represent over two-thirds (69 per. cent) of all materials used in textiles, a figure expected to rise to nearly three-quarters by 2030.

Mother of Pearl Brenon jacket, £295

I know, I know, that sounds so depressing. However, rather than despair, we need active hope, as opposed to the passively hopeful printed messages offered by fridge magnets. The Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who brokered the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, says we need ‘stubborn optimism’. She describes this force as an unshakeable determination to choose systems and ways of living that flip from exploiting the Earth to nurturing it.

Well just at the right time, when we need it most, the UK has produced a collection of sustainable fashion brands, often led by visionary CEOs that seem to me to embody exactly this. I have been tracking sustainability and analysing sustainable fashion in the UK for nearly 20 years. Looking at the work and progress of some of the brands we bring together in this edition of GBB was a restorative experience. In a ‘code red’ scenario, these are the brands that give hope and direction.

There is no legal definition of ‘sustainable’ in fashion, so it remains open to interpretation (and greenwash or overclaiming). But to me it means three core things. First, sustainable fashion design and production must respect the planet’s boundaries. Second, we must ‘balance’ and only take what can be replenished. Third, we have to acknowledge that all species and landscapes (nature) are interconnected: you can’t damage one without impacting another.

Amy Powney, creative director of Mother of Pearl, definitely gets it. I have lost count of the times I have heard fashion editors marvelling about the superb fit of her dresses – and that remains a very important box to tick, especially in these days of rental (in April this year Mother of Pearl teamed up with OnLoan to offer a rental arm). But she is also known for being incredibly driven. ‘Sustainability isn’t a one-dimensional issue that can be solved by opting for a fabric with green credentials; the final fabric is just the tip of the iceberg and what’s looming underneath is rarely considered or examined,’ Amy said recently. ‘Supply chains are not straightforward, so social, environmental and political factors must be taken into account when looking at manufacturing with any country.’

Christopher Raeburn at work

To me this is so on the money. Fashion is a full spectrum industry, from the picking of the fluffy cotton bol, the spinning, ginning, weaving and clattering of looms, right through to the bit that gets the most attention – the marketing, the shows, the selling. As it whirrs through continents and processes, a garment builds up an astronomical debt to Planet Earth. The brands we feature here know this industry feels Earth’s every heartbeat. For instance, when Himalayan glaciers melt and affects a monsoon, the fashion industry feels it through a depleted cotton harvest, which also takes a huge toll on the people who produce the cotton. Farmers are as much a part of the fashion value chain as designers.

Great sustainable brands don’t just feel it, they account for their ecological debt too. Over the years, I have interviewed Stella McCartney often. Each time she emphasises that her brand is far from perfect, yet the percentage of her collection she refers to edges up a little. For pre-fall 2021, the percentage of her collection made up of sustainable material had reached 80 per cent. ‘It’s the highest number I’ve ever achieved, but it wasn’t easy getting there,’ she told the fashion press. As always with Stella, the claim was accompanied by evidence, worked out via careful eco accounting, which goes into quite some factual detail. For example, the use of brass on some pieces accounted for 77 per cent of the brand’s water pollution impact, due to mining.

OK, for some this will be too much information, but Stella has the ability to turn dry sustainable theory and carbon accounting into inimitable pieces that are both desirable and a lot of fun. In her world, global change comes via bio-based, recyclable, faux furs and forest regeneration translates into big chunky boots made from sustainable wood.

And to me that’s the job of a sustainable brand today too. You have to drive the mission along. Stella McCartney is the great mainstreamer of ecological ideas, moving them away from the mere chatter of the climate bubble to centre stage. Who else, when fashion waste was still something of an untold story, would elect to photograph her 2017 winter collection in a Scottish landfill site, the model lying in beautiful dresses on top of junked cars and everyday consumer detritus? It was a characteristic provocation designed to move the debate forwards.

RÆMADE Air Brake dress, £645, made from parachute material

Eliminating fashion waste is often a core part of a leading sustainable brand today. For East London designer, Christopher Raeburn, liberating surplus fabric (often military fabrics, in his case) drove him from the off. ‘It was a love of fabrics that first started REMADE,’ Christopher said, when he founded his eponymous menswear brand in 2009. ‘What’s really exciting is taking an original item and completely reworking it. It gives us such a unique selling point and our customers get really excited about the authenticity of the fabric.’

To me, Christopher Raeburn is king of telling and selling the story of the fabric. His design breathes life into surplus fabrics and deadstock; great coats, parachute silks even a 24-man life raft and a fighter-pilot compression suit can be refashioned into his signature outer wear. But he is also king of democratising sustainable style. Most sustainable brands do not try hard enough to involve customers who are priced out. But Christopher, who is also global creative director for Timberland, has formed meaningful collaborations with Depop (the reuse marketplace) to produce a sunhat pattern and with Aesop (the cosmetics brand) to produce a DIY accessory case. In this way, he comes across more as a movement builder than a traditional fashion brand.

His positive influence, and that of many of the brands featured in this issue, are increasingly obvious in the wider industry. Earlier this year luxury conglomerate LVMH announced it was launching an online marketplace for its ‘deadstock’ fabric and leathers. The fashion industry loses an estimated £120 billion per year in unused deadstock (Queen of Raw) so of course there is a commercial logic to using it. But in a conservative industry like fashion, where the burning and dumping of unsold stock has become the norm, you need fire-starters like Christopher Raeburn. Without these sustainable brands driving forwards, nothing changes.

But with them everything can change, including the very idea of the purpose of fashion.

Sustainable fashion must be about people as much as it must be about carbon emissions. Like Christopher, Cameron Saul and Oli Wayman define their fashion business as one that uses craft and artisan skill to create positive social impact. Bottletop was launched in 2002 through a design collaboration with Mulberry and a bag made from recycled bottletops. It has grown into a luxury brand with atelier and training programmes in Brazil and Nepal. But these days you’re likely to see luxury brands at United Nations conferences using Bottletop’s bracelet #Togetherbands, made from upcycled materials, including decommissioned AK47s from child soldiers, to push forward the Sustainable Development Goals.

A volunteer harvests flax

Make no mistake, the mission of a sustainable fashion designer has grown, and today’s brands will intervene where they need to. It made sense to see Stella striding up to world leaders at the G7 summit in Cornwall agitating for curbs on unsustainable fashion – obviously looking fabulous in strappy heels and a blue dress. ‘I’m really here to ask all of these powerful people in the room to make a shift from convention to a new way of sourcing and new suppliers into the fashion industry,’ she said, ‘One of the biggest problems that we have in the fashion industry is we’re not policed in any way. We have no laws or legislations that will put hard stops on our industry.’

Doubtless there are some that would prefer to see business as usual and no hard stops. They have failed to grasp that on a planet of climate shocks and ecological collapse there won’t be business for any brand. But now the leading sustainable brands don’t just hold the line, they go deeper, much deeper.

Ten years ago in California, Rebecca Burgess, an expert in natural dying, founded Fibreshed, with the idea of taking locally grown fibre for fashion to market, reconnecting fashion to farming using textile crafts. What excites me about this revolutionary approach is that it is not restricted to making fashion’s impact ‘less bad’, which was the definition of sustainable design when I first began tracking it. Instead, it focuses on fibre and ecosystems to regenerate, both the soil and atmosphere (natural fibres grown in a natural cycle can store carbon) and to regenerate the very culture and beating heart of fashion.

In Blackburn, Homegrown Homespun, the Fibreshed affiliate for Northwest England, is a life affirming project from textile expert Justine-Aldersey-Williams and Patrick Grant, the affable designer who appears on TV’s Great British Sewing Bee. Patrick has been such a champion of regional, sustainable fashion, through his Community Clothing brand and Super Slow Way, an art programming project that works with communities along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. With a team of dedicated volunteers, Homegrown Homespun has planted flax and woad, two of the UK’s forgotten fibre and dye crops, on urban land. Following a pair of indigo linen jeans from the experimental first crop, the idea is to upscale production by 2023. The point here is not that Homegrown Homespun can singlehandedly challenge the global reliance on synthetics. Of course, it can’t and won’t. Nor is it an historical re-enactment, although the fact it’s planted in the heart of the North West’s historic textile industry resonates. Rather, this is an ambitious example of how a healthy fashion supply chain looks – short and transparent, climate beneficial and linking farming to fashion. It is both a counter point to the craziness of what passes for mainstream, and an advertisement for how functional, nurturing and logical our fashion system can be. It serves as a reminder to all of us stubborn optimists that the most important collaboration any of us will ever have is the one with planet Earth.

Featured Image: Stella McCartney AW‘21

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Luxury Is Dead. Long Live Luxury.

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GBB Zero Issue

Lord Grimstone on the Race to Zero

‘My message to the luxury industry is to use the fact people trust you and aspire to your values to speak out and commit publicly and visibly to cutting emissions,’ says Minister Grimstone. ‘GIS is likely to be the largest gathering of money that the UK has ever had under one roof and is a great opportunity to showcase what the luxury industry can – and is – doing to address climate change.’ He cites British fashion brands like Stella McCartney and Burberry, which are already globally recognised for helping to lead the march towards net zero.

Lord Grimstone of Boscobel is Minister for Investment jointly at the Department for International Trade and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. (Portrait by Alexandra Dao)

‘The recent 2021 UK Attractiveness Survey from EY [formerly Ernst & Young] showed that investors think Britain is the most attractive place in which to invest in Europe,’ Minister Grimstone continues. ‘Take recent stories like Nissan choosing Britain as its site for a major new electric vehicle factory and the vaccine programme. Our brands stand for innovation, creativity, reliability and increasingly sustainability, and it’s those qualities that create such a positive perception and will continue to attract investment.’

When it comes to Race to Zero, many luxury brands can be daunted by its challenges, particularly as there are so many different initiatives to sign up to. To make it easier for smaller brands to take the first step, earlier this year the government launched the Together for our Planet campaign, so SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) can now sign up online to an SME Climate Commitment. ‘There is so much talk about greenwashing nowadays, so brands that just go on talking about sustainability initiatives without making a positive, public, transparent pledge to cut emissions, risk being accused of it,’ he continues. ‘A public commitment is a daunting step, but we all have to do it or we won’t have a planet to save any more. A public commitment should be aspirational and brands should wear it as a badge of honour – and watch new customers come running.

‘COP21 in Paris achieved some great things and we need to continue to build on that. Only if we all unite after COP26 can we create a massive, everlasting legacy. But the one thing that could stand in the way is selfishness. Businesses must realise that customers will eventually turn away from them if they don’t commit to cutting emissions. A brand that doesn’t associate with these values will end up being left behind, at great cost to their own businesses as well as to the planet. The most important – and advantageous – thing all CEOs reading this can do right this minute is to make a public commitment by signing up their brand to Race to Zero or the SME Climate Commitment.’

For more information, please visit racetozero.unfccc.int or smeclimatehub.org

Featured image: Getty Images

Book Review: Earthshot: How to Save Our Planet

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