Fashion greenwashing debunked💩

Coach gets uncoached

Good Morning Squid Gamers,  
It’s time to relax the rat race and breathe. 

October 12th was Columbus Day?
Dia de la raza? Hispanic Day? Italian Heritage Day?
This day needs to be officially cancelled.

FROM APPLES TO COMBAT BOOTS

In need of awesome autumn boots? Check out Viron. A kickass footwear brand specializing in combat boots made from apple leather, recycled suede from PET bottles and upcycled army surplus.
Bonus point: every style will make people think you lived in Berlin at one point.

PLANT BASED

WHY FLEXITARIANS MATTER

Prefer oat mylk to cow milk? Going for the shroom burger at Shake Shack? Slowly decreasing your meat consumption? Are you pescatarian, vegetarian or just admit it... you are flexitarian. Overall, the fact that you’re trying matters! Decreasing counts…the more flexitarians there are the more vegan innovation there is.

By 2025 plant-based protein is expected to reach $8.3B. This is only thanks to flexitarians becoming such a large market! Thanks guys.

GREENWASH DETECTOR

UN-COACHED

Coach–the American handbag brand–was caught red handed this past weekend. Anna Sacks is a tik tok dumpster diver in NYC showing the world the hypocrisy behind several retail brands. The most recent discovery being Coach and its blatant greenwashing. 

The company’s policy is to slash unwanted merchandise (handbags and shoes) and throw them in the dumpster. What’s worse? According to their website they really “care” about the circular economy and even offer a repair program. Anna Sacks rightly blasts them for their hypocrisy, bringing them the slashed products to the store to be “repaired."

Sadly, Coach is not the only retailer destroying merchandise. The fashion industry throws away billions of dollars worth of their own products every year.

Since Anna’s tiktok went viral, Coach has now declared it will stop with this practice. 

“Now that we got caught, we decided to change.” Great. 

AUSTRIAN CARBON TAX

Last week Austria announced its new carbon tax at €30 per ton. So who already taxes Carbon worldwide and how does it work?

There are two ways to differentiate carbon taxes: a Cap & Trade system (that is quite commonplace nowadays) or a direct carbon price taxed per ton with a price set by the Government. 

Cap & Trade: Emissions Trading System
China, EU, USA, New Zealand, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, UK all have it in place. 
Basically, how it works in the EU is that the EU Commission sets a cap on the tons of CO2 that can be emitted, if companies emit more than the cap they need to buy "allowances" through the EU ETS.
If you're confused, check out how this works by watching this quick video.

Some countries have both: Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, France, Finland, and now Austria.
However, the price per ton drastically differs. In Sweden it's €116.33 per ton, in Poland it's €0.07 per ton.

You might notice that the big polluters don't have a carbon tax. The Cap & Trade systems have been in place for over a decade now, and they're clearly not enough. It's time everyone to have a global price on carbon.

Below a map of Europe with the countries that have a carbon tax and the tax amount per ton of CO2.