Depop earns climate-neutral certification by South Pole

Fashion resale marketplace, Depop, has been certified as a climate-neutral company by leading climate solutions provider South Pole.

The fashion marketplace revealed a new sustainable design plan in February to transform fashion consumption, with a goal of being a climate-neutral firm by the end of 2021.

According to Depop, it has successfully offset all material sources of scope 1-3 greenhouse gas emissions, with the South Pole certificate for 2021 covering 100% of material scope 1-3 emissions in 2020.

Since January 2020, Depop has been retrospectively offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from shipping, which has now been expanded to include all of its material measured emissions, such as its offices and utilities, IT equipment and cloud services, and employees’ travel and work from home activities.

Justine Porterie, global head of sustainability at Depop, said that becoming climate neutral is an essential milestone on their journey towards making Depop actively nicer to people and the planet. They believe in setting high objectives and concentrating our efforts on producing results and iterating quickly, so now that they’ve reached this milestone, they’ll turn their attention to net zero. On the next leg of their climate journey, they’re looking forward to working with Tech Zero.

Depop is partnering with South Pole to quantify and compensate for all of its 2020 calculated emissions by sponsoring two worldwide climate action initiatives in Zimbabwe and Turkey through their partnership. By preventing deforestation and land degradation of roughly 785,000 hectares of forest in Zimbabwe, the Kariba Forest Protection project prevents more than 3.5 million tonnes of CO2 from being released into the sky.

While the Dora-II Geothermal project in Turkey, one of the world’s top cotton producers and a major fashion industry supplier, intends to minimize the country’s dependency on imported fossil fuels by funding a geothermal power plant near Izmir in the Aegean area.

Bethan Halls, regional director at South Pole, said that Depop already encourages sustainable customer behavior and reached climate neutrality for its shipping emissions in 2020. It is now scaling up this success to compensate for its scope 1-3 emissions, further enhancing its climate leadership efforts. Depop South Pole has been awarded the climate-neutral firm label for 2021.

Depop also joined the Tech Zero Taskforce this month, a coalition of tech companies of all sizes from throughout the world dedicated to combating climate catastrophe. Tech Zero is a UN Race to Zero official partner and is endorsed by the UK government. Depop will continue to measure scope 1-3 emissions as a member company, with intentions to broaden the scope of its scope 3 emissions to include packaging and associated end-user energy use.