PLANET
Managing Our Water Impact
Managing Our Water Impact
We have been quantifying our water usage since 2019, and we believe the majority of our water footprint comes from our indirect operations, specifically the manufacturing of our products.
We are working to better understand the water impacts in our global supply chain, and are requiring all of the factories and mills that make our products to complete the Higg FEM in 2023.
In 2022, we set a goal to utilize the Higg Index to further drive reduced water usage in the manufacturing and washing of our products by 2025.
Total Water Use
Due to the uncertainty of supplier information, water use can be different year over year. Carter’s is exploring this and is committed to improving data quality within our environmental reporting framework and supply chain.
Garment washing
Garment washing is a common step in apparel manufacturing to enhance the softness of a garment and to provide a distressed or “lived in” look to products such as denim. Over the past few years we have worked with our designers to reduce the amount of styles that require garment washing to achieve our design intent. We will continue to monitor this extra processing to increase water conservation in our manufacturing process where appropriate.
Since 2019, we have reduced by 50% the number of our styles that require an additional garment washing process.
Arbor Day Foundation
Thanks to the generosity of Carter’s employees, for Earth Day 2022 we raised $20,000 for the Arbor Day Foundation, which will support the planting of 20,000 trees. According to the I-Tree Planting and EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculators, this effort contributed to:
- 47,152 metric tons of CO2 sequestered—equivalent to 10,251 cars off the road for a year
- 202 tons of air pollution removed
- More than 14 million gallons of water runoff avoided—equivalent to 21 Olympic-sized swimming pools