Fast Retailing is stepping up its climate ambition—and it has its supply chain to thank for it.
After slashing its Scope 3 carbon emissions by 20 percent from a 2019 baseline and hitting its target five years ahead of schedule, the Uniqlo parent company has raised the stakes, aiming for an additional 10 percent reduction by 2030.
“Initially, we wanted to be careful about what we were committing to,” Kazumi Yanai, director at Fast Retailing, said at a sustainability discussion at the Uniqlo showroom in New York City on Thursday. “Then because we saw progress, we raised the bar.”
Scope 3 emissions, which encompass all indirect greenhouse gases across a company’s value chain, are notoriously difficult to measure and manage because they originate with suppliers or consumers. At the same time, they often make up at least 75 percent of the total climate impact.
Case in point: Fast Retailing shrank its Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which are within its direct control, by 90.3 percent by 2025, five years earlier than planned, by increasing the share of renewable energy in its stores and offices to 93.5 percent, up from 84.7 percent in 2024.
A driver of the company’s brisk Scope 3 performance has been its pivot to less polluting raw materials, which now account for 19.4 percent of its total mix and are expected to reach 50 percent by 2030. Recycled polyester from PET bottles, in particular, constitutes 46.4 percent of all polyester used, up from 41.5 percent a year ago.
Still, Fast Retailing ultimately credits its deep-rooted supplier relationships as the true engine of its progress. Many of those partnerships, Yanai said, have lasted decades—an anomaly in an industry where a “race to the bottom,” as Cascale editorial director Kaley Roshitsh put it, encourages supplier hopping in search of the lowest price per unit.
“Thinking long-term instead of jumping between partners has made a huge impact in switching from coal to natural gas, for example, because they know what’s coming; they have visibility into our operations,” Yanai said of Fast Retailing’s suppliers. “We have a shared vision and work to achieve our goals together. Our teams are on site discussing issues not once a year but every day.”
Even so, Fast Retailing’s collaborative approach has historically focused on its Tier 1 factories. The bigger challenge is how to extend this model further upstream.
Last year, the company headed to Australia to pilot a wool program that would give it greater visibility into how it sources the fiber and ensure it was addressing potential issues in animal welfare, environmental practices, human rights and occupational safety. Fast Retailing is also conducting assessments in its construction and logistics operations, which can pose severe human rights risks. Both sets of projects sit under the larger umbrella of responsible procurement, which includes new raw materials procurement guidelines that set criteria for preferred materials beyond greenhouse gas emissions.
“Going forward, we will share these standards with our partners to set material-specific targets, starting with key materials, to accelerate the adoption of our preferred materials across the supply chain,” Seneiya Navajas, sustainability director at Uniqlo U.S.A.
Eventually, Fast Retailing hopes to enhance its raw material and operational visibility to the point where it can oversee its entire value chain in-house.
“We want to fully understand our raw material-level commitments while applying our own standards for quality, environmental impact and workers’ rights throughout the supply chain,” Navajas added.
Paula Bernstein, associate director of sustainability science at Worldly, which manages the Higg Index suite of sustainability measurement tools, agreed.
“If you can’t verify what you claim, it’s just marketing,” she said.
