News article
Puma confident of strengthening financial wealth and environmental health
Sportswear company Puma managed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 24% in 2023 compared to the previous year, despite reporting a sales growth of 6.6%.
A major obstacle in the drive towards sustainability is the cost of adapting to new ways of operating, but Puma claims to have found the sweet spot.
The German business achieved an 85% reduction of its own emissions and a 65% reduction of supply chain emissions relative to sales from the year before. This helped it to achieve its first science-based greenhouse gas reduction target in 2023, seven years ahead of the target year of 2030.
Despite this, Puma’s currency-adjusted sales growth grew by €8.602m, a figure that would have been at least 1.5% if not for the devaluation of the Argentine peso.
“Our strategy is to decouple growth from our greenhouse gas emissions,” Puma’s Senior Director of Sustainability Veronique Rochet told Global Sustainable Sport.
“This explains why we set absolute greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2030 and commit to net-zero for 2050. The steps we have taken (increasing renewable energy at Puma and our suppliers, using materials with a lower carbon footprint and Maersk’s low-emissions shipping tariff) do not hinder us from expanding our business while at the same time lowering our greenhouse gas emissions.”
Puma is aiming to reduce its emissions to a level that scientists state is necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. By the end of the decade, its goal is to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 90%.
“Our strategy is to decouple growth from our greenhouse gas emissions."
These objectives have been approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi).
Despite its progress, Puma is eager not to gatekeep its methods for development.
“We believe in industry collaboration and we are already doing a lot to share our knowledge with the wider industry. For example, following the successful conclusion of our RE:SUEDE project we have made a B2B document freely available to share our learnings from the project, in which we turned an experimental version of our iconic Suede sneaker into compost,” Rochet said.
“Puma has been a long-term member of numerous industry collaborations to cover a wide field of environmental and social issues that need to be addressed together within our industry such as Global Fashion Agenda or Textile Exchange.
“We are also a founding member of the UN’s Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, which aims to bring together different actors across our industry to reduce greenhouse gases, especially in the supply chain and the Zero Discharge for Hazardous Chemicals Foundation, which has set standards and guidelines to eliminate harmful chemicals from our industry supply chain.”