Q&A from Patagonia's website regarding CSR report publishing

(source: http://www.patagonia.com/corporate-responsibility-faqs.html)

 

Q:

 

Does Patagonia publish a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report or social audit?

 

A:

 

We have not yet published a CSR or sustainability report that follows the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or other framework used by other companies.

 

We are committed to co-responsibility for humane treatment of workers throughout the supply chain. We publish our factory list online. You can access social audit report results for factories that make Patagonia clothes on the Fair Labor Association’s (FLA) website. We are an accredited member of FLA, which randomly audits a sampling of our factories every year, as well as our own CSR program every three years.

 

To report on environmental responsibility, our Footprint Chronicles looks at some of the environmental impacts in our supply chain. It allows us to talk about critical social and environmental stories with all our stakeholders–customers, press, suppliers, employees and students–in unspecialized, everyday language. We give priority to the issues that challenge us the most–or that our stakeholders regard as a challenge and ask us to address. We highlight failures and ongoing challenges, as well as incremental successes.

 

We inform our customers and the public on our progress in social and environmental responsibility in other ways too–in the Corporate Responsibility section of The Footprint Chronicles, in our annual Environmental & Social Initiatives booklet, in the Environmental and Social Responsibility section of our website, and on our blog, "The Cleanest Line." We feel these are exciting, interesting, interactive and transparent methods to show our commitment to human rights, environmentalism and ethics.

 

In early 2012, we became a Benefit Corporation –the first company in California to do so. The certification process requires annual reporting. You can find our B Corp annual report here.

 

The advantage to the reader/user of sustainability reports that follow the Global Reporting Initiative framework is the ability to easily compare data from different companies. The disadvantage: a sustainability report, like an annual report, can be a dull read held forth in specialized language that clouds as much as it reveals. Because we recognize the advantages of easy comparability, we are investigating the possibility of importing data we collect for The Footprint Chronicles into a more predictable but exciting framework (and with as much plain speaking as possible). We want to continually raise, rather than lower, the quality of the conversation we’ve created with our stakeholders over the past years.