Columbia Sportswear Company (CSC), a leading American sportswear brand, has released its 2021 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Report.
The report highlights the company’s performance highlights and progress made throughout 2021 in the three pillars of its corporate responsibility strategy — empowering people, sustaining places and responsible practices.
The company says that in 2021, it continued to work towards its manufacturing climate target.
Strategically set to align with business and manufacturing partner development and to allow for achievement, CSC has committed to a 30 per cent reduction in Scope 3 manufacturing emissions by 2030, as compared to a 2019 baseline.
CSC’s manufacturing climate target requires manufacturing partners to meet facility-level targets by 2030.
The report says that the company is already seeing a shift to greater usage of coal-alternative energy sources. Greater usage of coal-alternative energy sources, such as natural gas, biomass, or renewable energy, is important as these sources emit less carbon dioxide than coal, helping to lower overall emissions from its manufacturing partners’ operations.
Talking about India, the report says that increases in renewable energy sources, for example, are a result of greater accessibility to and installation of rooftop solar panels, as well as more Government incentives, particularly in India for renewables.
Tim Boyle, Chairman, President, & CEO of the company, says “After the pandemic of 2020, we had high hopes for a smoother 2021. We had planned to ‘get back to normal’. However, like many companies, we continued to experience disruptions to the business due to the pandemic. Despite facing these challenges, the company had its best year in history, and we did so while maintaining our commitment to environmental, social and governance issues.”
He further added “We proved, once again, that by living our core value of Doing the Right Thing, we can thrive and do well by our people, places and practices. We will continue to evolve and improve. As technologies change, we will look to adopt them. We will continue to invest in our people and to make sure that diversity, equity and inclusion are important considerations in our processes.”
