Inditex, the parent company of fashion brand Zara, is joining 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 Gen raw material and product solutions and FSC certification.

The decade-long CanopyStyle commitment of Inditex to eliminate the use of wood from ancient and endangered forests in its textiles has now been expanded to ensure such wood is not ending up in paper packaging.

The fashion sector is a major consumer of paper packaging for shipping boxes, e-commerce envelopes, paper bags, hang tags and paperboard boxes.

“It’s exciting to have Inditex bring the same leadership to reducing its paper packaging footprint as it has for the last decade to eliminate vital forests from its textile supply chains,” said Nicole Rycroft, executive director of Canopy. “A company of its 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,” added Javier Losada, Inditex chief sustainability officer. “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.”

Inditex has already made moves to reduce its use of paper with initiatives such as Green to Pack, a programme 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 the group’s packaging, not to mention millions of dollars in cost savings for the company. Inditex has also launched the #Bringyourbag initiative, to encourage reuse by applying a fee for paper bags and envelopes in almost 70 markets. This has incentivised customers to reduce paper bag consumption by 47%.

Inditex has also been a pioneer in so-called Next Gen manmade cellulose fibre (MMCF), making a public commitment to purchase 2,000 tons of the first commercial-scale circular MMCF pulp and committing to invest in the development of materials that do not yet exist at an industrial scale, enabling 25% of its textiles to be Next Gen by 2030.

The addition of Inditex brings the Pack4Good initiative to 449 brands, worth over $287.4 billion in combined annual revenue.

www.canopyplanet.org

www.inditex.com