Ken Pucker’s article clearly describes both the barriers to circularity’s adoption and its practical limitations in addressing the challenge of living on a planet with finite resources. His set of recommendations will also be helpful in driving measurable progress in the fashion industry’s uptake of circular practices. However, given the barriers Pucker outlines, we must consider what needs to happen for those recommendations to be implemented realistically. The solution is not as simple as stating, “We need regulation,” or “We need less consumption.” All of us interested in systems change also have to tackle the “hows,” not just the “whats.”
The intersections between Pucker’s critique and his recommendations go unexamined. For example, his first barrier to circularity, “unchanged system goals and incentives,” includes public-company incentives tied to short-term revenue growth and profit maximization. Yet this barrier is a hurdle to the industry’s adoption of his second recommendation to “regulate effectively.” Because fashion executives are financially incentivized to deliver short-term revenue and profit growth, they are equally incentivized to block regulations that might curb that growth. We are, in fact, currently seeing this pattern play out in the fashion sector. As organizations and people, including me, work to advance New York state’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, a bill that sets an environmental and labor floor for production in the apparel space, we also hear that companies and industry trade associations are quietly hiring lobbyists to discredit the proposed legislation, all while promoting their own limited circularity initiatives.
What also goes unexamined in Pucker’s article is the role corporate-captured nonprofit organizations—those a part of Sustainability Inc.—play in hindering progress toward the goal of sustainability. “Corporate capture” is the phenomenon of private industry wielding its power to control decision-making in a particular domain—in this case, the decision-making authority in nonprofit organizations. While they seem benevolent—as their nonprofit status implies—these nonprofits give their funders and citizens in general false hope that they are effectively addressing sustainability issues. The consequence of this false advertising is the absorption of dollars that could be going toward more effective measures, such as regulation. Yet devoting resources to these nonprofits only maintains Sustainability Inc.’s status quo.
While legally, as 501(c)(3)s, these organizations must have a benevolent purpose, nothing in the law prescribes the pace of change they set or their effectiveness. And because these nonprofits suffer from corporate capture, they set glacially slow targets that are entirely voluntary and have no serious consequences if they are not met—all while the actual glaciers rapidly melt. The best analogy for the deceptive work of Sustainability Inc. nonprofits comes from Tariq Fancy, the former CIO for sustainable investing at BlackRock: It’s like a doctor telling a cancer patient to take wheatgrass when chemotherapy is available. The planet has a serious health problem, and corporate-captured nonprofits are selling the wheatgrass of slow-paced voluntary measures while regulators have the chemotherapy available in the form of legally enforceable sustainability targets. Funders looking to make measurable progress must avoid the distraction of Sustainability Inc. nonprofits and instead deploy resources to overcome corporate lobbying efforts and help pass the type of regulation Pucker recommends.
Foundations and donors seriously interested in structural change also need to assess their own structures that limit their ability to fund lobbying efforts and instead consider new philanthropic vehicles, including 501(c)(4)s, which can fund these efforts more fluidly than 501(c)(3)s. Financial resources can then be utilized both to advocate for specific policy solutions and to educate citizens about Sustainability Inc. and the powerful role that they have to demand change and accountability—not from individual companies but from their elected representatives, who can ensure that regulatory solutions become law.
Effective regulation is the lynchpin in the industry’s adoption of Pucker’s other recommendations. For example, a law that requires fashion companies to achieve science-based targets will certainly accelerate the industry’s investment in breakthrough solutions and cross-sector collaboration, since all players will be legally required to achieve the same target and will need to invest resources and collaborate to reach them. I agree with Pucker that utilizing the coercive power of the state—particularly its ability to extract fines—incentivizes corporate compliance.
To achieve all of Pucker’s recommendations and, ultimately, to reach sustainability, we need those who consider themselves a part of Sustainability Inc.—as Pucker once was—to have the courage to publicly state the things I have heard them say privately, even when such disclosures run counter to maximizing short-term profit. Second, we need citizens and the donor community to understand the role they play either as enablers of the wishful thinking advanced by Sustainability Inc. or as catalysts fighting for legislation that adds the necessary guardrails to capitalism.
None of this work is easy, of course. But leadership demands charting the course for a market system to thrive on a planet with limited resources and time. We need resolute leadership now.
Read more stories by Maxine Bédat.