Today, Inditex, the parent company of fashion brand Zara, and six other brands such as Berksha and Massimo Dutti, is joining solutions-driven non-profit Canopy’s Pack4Good campaign. Through Pack4Good, partners focus on sustainable alternatives to logging Ancient and Endangered Forests, including recycled pulp and paper, Next Generations Solutions, and FSC Certification.
Inditex’s decade-long CanopyStyle commitment to eliminate the use of Ancient and Endangered Forests in their textiles has now expanded to ensure these vital forests are not ending up in their paper packaging.
The fashion sector is a major consumer of paper packaging for shipping boxes, ecommerce envelopes, paper bags, hang tags, and paperboard boxes. Protecting and restoring natural forests is essential to stabilizing the climate and reversing the biodiversity crisis. Reduction, reuse, recycled content, as well as Next Gen alternatives made from waste, are key to a healthier and more sustainable planet.
“It’s exciting to have Inditex bring the same leadership to reducing their paper packaging footprint as they have for the last decade to eliminate vital forests from their textiles,” said Nicole Rycroft, Executive Director of Canopy. “A company of their significance sends a signal to paper packaging suppliers that it’s time to give forests a break and to invest in and scale lower impact alternatives.”
“Inditex has worked hard to keep endangered forests out of our textile supply chain. Now we will extend that work to our packaging, where we have already taken steps towards reduction, reuse and increase of recycled content. We look forward to continuing this work with Canopy to bring it to a new level, including the development of Next Gen alternatives that both reduce waste and help keep forests standing,” explained Javier Losada, Inditex Chief Sustainability Officer.
Inditex Group owns Zara, Berksha, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius, Oysho, and Zara Home. The Group has made a long journey to reduce its use of paper with initiatives such as Green to Pack (GtP), a program for reusing warehouse-to-retail paper boxes up to five times before sending them for recycling. This resulted in a reduction of nearly 80% of paper use within that segment of their packaging — not to mention millions of dollars in cost savings for the company. Inditex has also launched #BRINGYOURBAG initiative, to encourage reuse by applying a fee for paper bags and envelopes in almost 70 markets. This has incentivized their customers to reduce paper bag consumption by 47%.
Inditex has also been one of the Next Gen MMCF stalwarts, making a public commitment to purchase 2000 tonnes of the first commercial-scale circular MMCF pulp and committing to invest in the development of Next Gen materials that do not yet exist at an industrial scale so as to enable 25% of their textiles being Next Gen by 2030.
As a Pack4Good partner, the company will continue building on existing initiatives to reduce the amount of packaging it uses, including employing reusable boxes for intrabusiness use, increasing recycled paper content, and incorporating innovative Next Generation fibres into their paper packaging. Next Gen alternatives to wood fibre for paper include plentiful materials around the world that are commonly wasted or burned, like cereal straws, hemp stalks, jute, or even tomato stems.
The addition of Inditex brings the Pack4Good initiative to 449 brands, worth over 287.4 billion USD in annual revenue. Read the Inditex Pack4Good policy.