What’s inside the Parade Product score? A lot.
We worked with industry-leader, Eco-Age, to develop a methodology to understand the holistic impact of every one of Parade’s products. We know that true sustainability accounts for the product across many environmental factors, but also human ones. That’s why each product is scored across three different topics – Climate, Social and Circularity – and when weighted together they make up the final Parade Product Score.
On every product page, you’ll see the total Parade Product Score and the breakdown of Climate, Social and Circularity components.
Climate:
How have we reduced CO2 across the lifecycle of this product?
We weighted this at 40% because there is a lot that Parade can be doing on our end to mitigate the climate impact of our products.
Materials and manufacturing are key carbon touchpoints for many brands, and our use of recycled and reduced-impact materials helps reduce the impact of our fabrics. Our material selection is constantly evolving (thanks SuperSoft!) to helps us continue to reduce the impact of our designs. In addition, we know that product distribution also contributes to our climate impact. To score ourselves against the entire lifecycle of the product, we have gone beyond measuring the carbon footprint for each product and included a grade denoting reduction efforts at any lifecycle stage of the product.
- 100% - 90%: Highest rated products have reduced their CO2 emissions in the product over the last year.
- 89% - 60%: Medium rated products rely on high-quality carbon offsets.
- 59% - 40%: Low rated products are in the process of being measured.
- 39% - 0%: The CO2 emissions of these products are not measured (you actually won’t find any of these on Parade).
Social:
How are our factories treating their workers and the planet?
We weighted this at 40% because there are a lot of choices that Parade can make here to support the economic well-being, health and safety of the people in our world.
- 100%: Highest rated products are made in factories that are WRAP, Fairtrade or SA8000 certified and comply with our Supplier Code of Business Integrity which requires factories to pay workers in compliance with the Global Living Wage Standard.
- 75%: Medium rated products are made in factories that are actively working on becoming WRAP or SA8000 certified (but have not achieved it yet). However, they do comply with our Supplier Code of Business Integrity which requires factories to pay workers in compliance with the Global Living Wage Standard.
- 50% - 0%: We simply don’t work with factories that are not willing to sign our Supplier Code of Business Integrity, pay their workers in compliance with the Global Living Wage Standard or are working on their WRAP or SA8000 certification.
Circularity:
What % of raw materials are recycled or compostable and what happens at the end of a product’s life?
We weighted this at 20% because there are aspects of Circularity that are beyond Parade’s control – like access to recycling and consumer behavior.
Circularity is a crucial sustainability principle and adopting it on a large scale can reduce dependency on natural capital and reduce material and resource waste. We have been focused on helping our customers adopt best practices at the end of useful life through Second Life and our partnership with Terracycle, but we understand the circularity road is long and complex. For this part of the tool, we looked to Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Circulytics tool and used its basic principles to attach circularity data to our products. A product’s score is comprised of 2 equal parts:
- % of product material recycled / bio-based:
- Here, the product material is assigned two numerical scores relating to the % of recycled / bio-based materials and the % of non-recycled/non-bio-based materials. These scores are fed into the below equation and generate and contribute to 50% of the product’s overall score for Circularity
- % of product recyclability / compostability:
- The remaining 50% of the product’s Circularity score is calculated by the performance at the end-of-life, considering the % of the product that is recyclable or biodegradable once our customers are done wearing it. The scores are also fed into the below equation to generate the remaining 50% of the product’s overall score for Circularity
How our Circularity score measures up:
- 100% - 90%: Highest rated products have the highest proportion of recycled or biodegradable / compostable yarn and packaging raw materials that can be recycled or composted after use.
- 89% - 80%: Medium weighted products with some recycled biodegradable / compostable yarn and packaging raw materials and some steps in place for end-of-life management.
- 79%-60%: These use limited recycled, biodegradable / compostable yarns and packaging raw materials do not have steps in place for end-of-life management.
- 59%-0%: We don’t use products that rate below 59% in Circularity.
Read the full methodology.
Have any questions? Contact us at hi@yourparade.com
