The Swedish slow fashion brand Asket is the first in the industry to start issuing a receipt for the environmental impact of purchases alongside the traditional receipt in order to curb modern consumer habits. Of course, this is not printed out, but goes into the electronic inbox.
The so-called “Impact Receipt” contains a breakdown of the environmental costs and impacts of each Asket order. This details the CO2e emissions, water and energy consumption for each garment, as well as the impacts associated with packaging and shipping options.
Measuring consumption-based footprint…
Asket wants to show its customers that every purchase costs the planet resources and wants to help them keep an overview of their consumption-based footprint. The aim is to change the relationship with clothing from “transactional to meaningful”.
“Because we were only ever told the price consumers pay for a piece of clothing, the industry has created a disconnect between our shopping habits and their impact,” explains Asket co-founder August Bard Bringéus in a press release.
With the launch of the Impact Receipt, the brand aims to address the growing environmental impact of the fashion industry, which is expected to increase by a further 50 percent by 2030, despite increasing awareness of the far-reaching environmental consequences.
… and make ‘environmental guilt’ visible
“As a result, we have accumulated an irreversible environmental debt. And until we put a price on our planet’s resources and understand what our decisions actually cost, we will never make concessions on the consumption to which we believe we are entitled,” adds Bringéus.
The data is also available on the product page of each individual garment as part of the transparency module, which also enables full supply chain traceability and cost breakdown.
By showing customers the resources extracted, transformed and released to produce garments, Asket aims to restore the true value of garments and enable customers to track their habits in the larger context of consumption-based footprint.
The “Impact Receipt” is not new – Asket introduced the concept a good three years ago after two years of hard work, but has now refined it. To achieve this, the brand collaborated with Berlin-based Vaayu Tech and calculated and analyzed the environmental evidence based on comprehensive garment traceability and life cycle impact analyses. This took into account all of the facilities and processes involved in the production of a garment — from farming to yarn spinning to weaving the fabric to dyeing to construction — as well as all the transportation in between.
“All Asket garments are displayed with their CO2e emissions from cradle to factory gate, energy consumption in kWh and water consumption in m3 (relative to water scarcity at production sites, as opposed to absolute water consumption), divided into four levels: raw materials, Fabric production, fabrication, transport and trimming,” explains Asket.
More information can be found on the brand’s website.