Business Ethics:Sustainable fashion
The purpose of this report is to benchmark some area of business ethics, for the company you might be
working for, your industry, or a particular area of business practices you are interested in. The audience for this
paper may be conceived in terms of your superior at work who assigns you the task of getting her and your unit
up to speed on best ethical practices in your area.
Topic:
Sustainable fashion: vegan leather, sustainable fibers, recycling used clothing; fabric and shoes from plastic
waste. Possible Companies: Adidas, All birds, Patagonia, Levis etc.
Content
Once you decide on the business ethics issue you want to cover, you will locate four companies which have
faced this problem. Your task in the paper will be as follows:
• to define your ethical issue;
• to describe EITHER
o what each of your four companies struggled with, with respect to the ethical issue, ALONG WITH what each
company did after either being discovered or admitting to having the ethical problem
o OR the stretch goal they assumed and how they went about fulfilling their improvement goal AND how well
they have done bringing that goal to reality;
• to describe Best Ethical Practices for your issue, established by one or more of the following means:
o Guidelines or rules established by a non-governmental organization
o Relevant laws and established professional codes of conduct, international standards, etc.
o Expert opinions gleaned from journal articles or other sources
o A “Best Practices” model company, which deploys and utilizes the best practices you are espousing
• to write a follow-up, where you 1) review and report on each company’s record on your ethical issue for the
past two years, and 2) give your judgment of how well each company handled its ethical issue, including what
they could or should have done differently.
You may certainly examine companies which are considered highly ethical and how they handle ethics within
their organization, or best ethical practices they have implemented.
In any case, you cannot use one of the four original companies as a Best Ethical Practices company. For that
you need a fifth company.
Sample Solution
Business Ethics: Sustainable Fashion
Sustainable fashion is a movement and process of fostering change to fashion products and the fashion system towards greater ecological integrity and social justice. The next big trend in sustainable fashion are brands that make clothing out of recycled plastics using sources such as polyester, soda bottles and even fishing nets.. Finding new ways to use them is the right thing to do. Companies like Patagonia has been making recycled polyester from post-consumer soda bottles since 1993 making it the first company to turn trash into fleece. Recycled polyester is in a wide range of Patagonia’s products from t-shirts to cold weather gear. Patagonia is widely regarded as a leader in corporate social responsibility, which it seeks to achieve both directly through donations of its profits and internal sustainability initiatives and indirectly by raising awareness for environmental issues.
