Textile Exchange

The North Face Releases First Public Sustainability Report

For 45 years, The North Face has been empowering people to explore the outdoors. This focus on the natural world has opened our eyes to the many challenges facing our planet. It’s not just our responsibility to ensure our products and business practices have the smallest possible impact on the environment — we strive to be a leader in meeting those challenges. 

We are sharing our commitment to sustainability through our first public sustainability report to encourage our employees, customers and partners to engage in a dialogue about the ways we can all be more responsible stewards of the natural world and our communities. Over the past few years, we have made great progress on engaging our suppliers with the bluesign® standard, an independent system for managing chemical input, resource efficiency and worker safety in the supply chain. Over 21% of our fabric met the bluesign® standard in our 2010 product line and we have set a target of 65% by 2015. In addition, we are on track to meet our normalized greenhouse gas reduction goal and are working hard to reduce our absolute emissions.

Despite our success and dedication to sustainability, we know there are always areas for improvement. As a global brand, we need to do a better job of expanding our sustainability strategy across the world. We plan to reevaluate our goals and progress periodically to ensure we are doing everything we can to reduce our environmental impacts. This report outlines our challenges in more detail and helps us continue our commitment to improving upon our goals moving forward.

Explore the report’s interactive maps, behind-the-scenes videos and athlete and employee insights at expeditionsustainability.com.

More at: expeditionsustainability.com