What Scope 3 Actually Looks Like in Fashion: A Breakdown by Category
Purchased Goods & Services: Where the Real Footprint Lives
If there’s one Scope 3 category that should be on every brand’s front page, it’s this one. “Purchased goods and services” — or PG&S — is where the bulk of fashion’s emissions are hiding. Not just hiding, really — outsourced, normalized, and barely explained.
This is the category that includes the raw materials (cotton, wool, polyester), fabric production (spinning, dyeing, finishing), and garment construction itself — cutting, sewing, assembling. In other words: this is the actual making of the clothes. And for most fashion brands, it makes up well over half of their total emissions. Often it’s 70–90%. At Stella McCartney, it’s 56% of their Scope 3.
So why don’t we hear more about it?
Because it’s the least convenient. Brands don’t own the farms, the mills, the factories. They buy from them. And that’s where the loophole lives. By outsourcing production, brands also distance themselves from responsibility — and from the data. Most of what gets reported under PG&S isn’t measured directly. It’s modeled, borrowed, estimated using industry averages or life cycle assessments that might be five years old and three supply chains removed from the truth.
Even Stella, who’s miles ahead of most luxury brands, admits in their 2023 report that for many categories, they’re still relying on LCAs — not on-the-ground data. And that’s a brand actively trying.
This matters because PG&S is where most “sustainability claims” are concentrated. When you see a label that says “organic cotton” or “recycled polyester,” it’s targeting this category. It’s also the first place brands go to cut emissions on paper. Swap one fabric for another, plug in a new emissions factor, and now your Scope 3 looks better — without touching the underlying system at all.
But here’s the harder truth: if your PG&S emissions are massive, then the only real way to lower them long-term is to produce less, produce better, and transform your sourcing relationships — not just tweak your materials.
It’s not that material swaps are meaningless. It’s that they’re often marketed as transformation when they’re really cosmetic surgery.
PG&S is the category that reveals whether a brand is just cleaning up its image — or actually reckoning with the realities of how its products are made.
Upstream Transport: Why Speed Has a Carbon Cost
Once a brand chooses its materials, the next step is moving them — from fields and factories to sewing floors and warehouses. This is called upstream transport and distribution. It’s the part of Scope 3 that covers how raw materials and semi-finished goods travel before they become finished products.
And while it doesn’t sound dramatic, it absolutely is. Because behind the word “transport” is one of fashion’s most unspoken habits: air freight.
Air freight is a carbon bomb. It emits 20 to 30 times more CO₂ per kilometer than shipping by sea. But in fashion, it’s common — especially for materials that are needed fast, samples that missed deadlines, or production runs that are racing to make a launch window.
Why? Because the system is built around urgency. We don’t live in a world of two slow, thoughtful collections per year anymore. We live in a system where a look appears on a runway in Paris and hits the high street in three weeks. Where brands like Shein can design, produce, and ship in under 72 hours — and where even luxury players are fighting to stay relevant in a real-time culture loop.
Air freight becomes the fix. The patch. The crutch.
In Stella McCartney’s 2024 report, they acknowledge that upstream transport makes up 11% of their Scope 3 emissions, and that air freight still plays a role. Even with all the work they’re doing elsewhere — regenerative cotton, take-back schemes — logistics remains a pressure point.
But it’s not just about emissions. It’s a signal of deeper instability. Because when brands rely on air freight, it often means something else in the system failed — a delay, a sourcing misstep, a last-minute change. So what we’re really looking at isn’t just a transport issue. It’s a design issue. A planning issue. A patience issue.
If we want lower emissions, it’s not just about shifting from planes to boats. It’s about creating systems — and timelines — that don’t need planes in the first place.
Which brings us back to the bigger question:
Are we willing to slow down? Or are we just trying to offset a speed problem without solving it?
Use of Sold Products: The Responsibility Shift
This part of Scope 3 covers what happens after you buy something — how it’s used, cared for, and maintained. In fashion, that mostly means washing, drying, ironing, and dry cleaning. Energy, water, heat. All the small but cumulative inputs tied to keeping your clothes wearable.
For most fashion brands, this category is small — often less than 10% of their total footprint. But it still shows up. And more importantly, it shows something else:
How responsibility gets handed off.
Many brands love this category. Not because they have control over it — but because it’s the one place they can frame you as the variable.
It’s where messaging shifts from “we’re reducing emissions” to “you should wash cold, line dry, and wear more before laundering.” You’ve seen the tags. You’ve seen the pledges. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that — customer behavior does matter.
But it also lets brands dodge the harder truth.
Because if you're relying on consumers to reduce emissions post-purchase — while still producing clothes that shed microplastics, degrade quickly, or require dry cleaning — you’re not being sustainable. You’re outsourcing the responsibility for your impact.
Stella McCartney has long promoted Clevercare, a garment labeling system designed to encourage responsible washing habits. It’s a good initiative — but it only works if the clothes themselves are built to last. If the garment pills in two washes or the seams unravel after three wears, no amount of cold washing is going to save its footprint.
And more broadly, “use-phase emissions” in fashion don’t operate in isolation. They depend on design choices, material choices, and customer context. A parka might be worn 200 times. A party dress? Maybe twice. So while this category matters — and while consumer action is real — it shouldn't become a shield. Brands can influence behavior, but they shouldn’t hide behind it.
End-of-Life: Where the Story Actually Ends
If you really want to understand how a brand thinks about sustainability, look at what it says — or doesn’t say — about what happens when its product is no longer useful. That’s what this category is about. End-of-life treatment. Where clothes go when they’re tossed, donated, shredded, burned, or maybe — rarely — recycled.
Most fashion emissions reports barely mention this. If they do, it’s usually modeled using a few generic assumptions: X% to landfill, Y% to incineration, Z% theoretically recyclable.
But that’s just it — theoretical recyclability is where most reporting stops. Brands love to say a fabric can be recycled. They rarely say if it will be. Or if the infrastructure even exists. Or if that polyester–cotton blend with stretch panels and chemical finishes is actually recyclable in practice.
Here’s the reality:
Most garments, even the ones labeled “sustainable,” are designed for discard.
That means mixed fibers, permanent seams, glued-on logos, and composite materials that make separation nearly impossible. And it means a massive number of products that quietly exit the supply chain with no plan for recovery. Some brands are starting to think about this. Stella McCartney, for example, launched a parka made from 100% ECONYL® nylon — a mono-material design that was built for disassembly and reuse. It’s rare. And even then, it only works if the take-back system exists, if customers use it, and if the processing pipeline is in place to recycle it properly.
Most brands aren’t there. They’re still designing for novelty, not for next use.
Which means the bulk of fashion’s waste footprint gets hidden behind poetic language about “circularity” — when in practice, it’s still a straight line to landfill.
The Forgettables: When Emissions Don’t Fit the Narrative
There’s a whole tier of Scope 3 categories that rarely show up in sustainability campaigns — not because they’re irrelevant, but because they’re harder to talk about, harder to glamorize, and harder to track.
Things like:
Capital goods — the emissions from store build-outs, mannequins, tech equipment, fittings.
Franchises — emissions from retail spaces a brand doesn’t directly own.
Business travel and employee commuting
Waste generated during production
Packaging that never makes it to the final customer
They’re scattered. They’re messy. And they’re often left out — or just bundled into a footnote.
But together, these “other” categories can still make up a meaningful portion of a brand’s footprint. At Stella McCartney, capital goods, franchising, and upstream leased assets account for over 16% of Scope 3 combined. That’s not background noise — that’s a chunk of the system.
And that’s the point. These emissions exist. But because they don’t tie directly to product, they get treated like someone else’s problem. This is where you see the limits of marketing-led sustainability. You can build a low-emission store interior, reduce franchise emissions, or retool your travel policy — but none of that fits on a hang tag. So it gets dropped from the story. But real sustainability means accounting for all of it. Even the inconvenient parts.
Seeing the Map, Not Just the Metrics
Sustainability reporting can feel like a numbers game — percentages reduced, targets hit, categories named. But Scope 3 isn’t just about data. It’s a map of how a brand operates. What it values. What it avoids. What it controls — and what it distances itself from.
And once you learn how to read it, the story becomes pretty clear. If most of a brand’s impact lives in Scope 3, but most of its reporting talks about Scope 1 and 2, that’s not transparency — it’s a distraction. If its sustainability narrative centers on new materials, but says nothing about factory energy, shipping modes, or recyclability — that’s not circularity — it’s curation. If it talks about “carbon reductions” but doesn’t specify which categories dropped and why — that’s not accountability — it’s optics.
None of this means the whole system is broken. But it does mean that reading Scope 3 — really reading it — requires a different lens. Not just a technical one, but a human one. One that understands that fashion is built on long supply chains, fragile relationships, and timelines that value speed over care.
The emissions are just the trace.