Primark 'cares'

I remember learning about sweatshops for the first time in year 7 geography. My teacher used Primark as a case study to explain how we were able to spend just £3 on a t-shirt because many popular high street brands were making their clothing in incredibly poor conditions. She taught us about the criminally dangerous factories who used child labour and didn’t give fair wages to any of its employees for their hard work. When I learnt this, the Rana Plaza disaster had only just happened, so the public were only just becoming aware of the horrendous working conditions many garment workers faced around the globe and how our spending habits encouraged these malpractices. 9 years later, have brands like Primark progressed to ethical manufacture systems?

Primark claims to be moving on from their history of sweatshops and environmental pollution, but how honest is this claim? On the surface, Primark seems to genuinely be moving on from their past ‘mistakes’ – the homepage of their website has a ‘Primark cares’ tab, which contains all of the information around their sustainability plans and goals. Their latest video at the top of this tab assures customers that they will keep their clothing affordable but sustainable, with a few impressive goals.

What they don’t explain is how they are going to do this.

This infographic is from the Primark website, which makes lots of great plans and assurances, but with no substance to back it up. Let’s break down these 9 proposals. By working backwards from where they aim to be, we can estimate how sustainable Primark is at the moment.

• Strengthening the durability of their clothes over the next 3 years suggests Primark knows how bad their garment quality is, and therefore must know that their items break quickly and are thrown away frequently. Throwing cheap garments away contributes to fashion’s sizeable waste problem.

• Clothes that can be recycled – this doesn’t go into much detail so I can’t be sure if they mean re-used (as in schemes to return your items to store/donating to charity partners etc) or actually recycled, meaning they have partnered with recycling plants to break down the existing fibres and turn them into new ones. While both of these types of recycling would be great to see, it doesn’t stop their products being produced and thrown away frequently.

• Recycled or sustainably sourced materials is incredibly important to sustainable design, but this plan means over the next 8 years they will still be making things with unsustainable fibres. Primark can churn out millions of unsustainable products over those 8 years.

• Halving their carbon footprint will have a large impact, so this is a good target. The issue is they have no explanation of how they will achieve this sizeable goal.

• Eliminating non-clothing waste is a relatively small step, and implies they know how much clothing waste they contribute to as they have specified no waste in all other areas.

• Regenerative agricultural practices are good as they can help the environment to regrow and means using less synthetics. However, this point doesn’t address the astronomical amounts of water needed to grow cotton, so it helps fix one part of the problem but not all of it.

• The wording of this point is important – they haven’t stated that they will give workers fair wages, but they will ‘pursue’ it, meaning they can’t guarantee that everyone will be paid fairly, even in 8 years time. Ironically, they boast on their website that they joined the Ethical Trading Initiative in 2006, which is an alliance that promotes respect for workers’ rights around the world. (They have a whole timeline of these alliances available on their Primark Cares tab.)

• Supporting women through skills development is a great, albeit somewhat vague, aim for Primark, but again their ambiguous phrasing makes me doubt how much they will actually achieve for gender equality, as ‘addressing’ problems doesn’t go as far as ‘fixing’ or ‘solving’ them.

• Access to better healthcare for their workers is something every brand should consider after the pandemic, but 2030 is a long time to wait for people employed by Primark at the moment.

So, on a surface level, it appears that Primark has lots of ambitious aims to fix some of the fashion industry’s problems, and a vast array of partnerships and programmes designed to help people and the planet. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any concrete evidence to suggest they are implementing important changes to help reduce their impact. There are still £3 vests available on their website, so I’m not convinced their sustainable ambitions are having a huge impact at the moment. I’d love to see Primark turn things around though, even if I have to wait until 2030 to see it.

- Tegan