We scored every fast fashion brand on sustainability. Here's what we found.

The fashion industry accounts for up to 10% of global carbon emissions — more than international flights and shipping combined. But which brands are actually doing something about it, and which are just talking?

We scored 18 fast fashion brands from 0–100 using the same formula we apply to every company in the SINK database. Public data. Open methodology. No corporate funding.

The results aren't pretty.

The scores

Not a single fast fashion brand scored above 40. The highest — H&M at 40 — still falls in the "Below expectations" band.

For context, Patagonia scores 52. Burberry scores 58. The gap between fast fashion and durable fashion isn't small — it's a different league.

What drives the scores down

Three things consistently drag fast fashion brands to the bottom of our index.

Overproduction

Fast fashion's business model is built on volume. SHEIN reportedly adds thousands of new styles per day. The more you produce, the more you emit — and no amount of recycled polyester offsets the sheer scale of output. Our scoring formula applies a scale penalty based on total emissions, which means high-volume producers start at a disadvantage. That's by design. The atmosphere doesn't care about efficiency ratios.

Supply chain opacity

Most fast fashion brands cannot tell you where their garments are made, let alone the emissions profile of each factory. SHEIN, Fashion Nova, and PrettyLittleThing score poorly on Scope 3 reporting because there's almost nothing to assess. You can't score what isn't disclosed — and lack of disclosure is itself a red flag.

Circular economy is almost nonexistent

Take-back schemes, resale platforms, and design-for-longevity are either absent or token gestures across most of these brands. When a t-shirt costs £4, nobody's designing it to last a decade.

The exceptions (sort of)

H&M at 40 isn't good, but it's meaningfully better than the bottom of the table. They publish detailed sustainability reports, have science-based targets validated by SBTi, and run one of the larger garment collection programmes in the industry. The gap between H&M and Fashion Nova (8) is 32 points — that's not noise, that's a real difference in effort.

Primark at 35 is interesting. They've historically avoided e-commerce (lower logistics emissions) and have invested in the Primark Cares programme. But at their volume and price point, the structural challenges are enormous.

Zara (Inditex) at 32 benefits from relatively strong corporate disclosure and a Join Life sustainable line, but the core model — 12+ collections per year — works against them.

The ultra-fast fashion problem

The bottom of the table is dominated by ultra-fast fashion: SHEIN (15), PrettyLittleThing (12), Temu (10), Forever 21 (8), Fashion Nova (8).

These brands share common traits: minimal sustainability reporting, opaque supply chains, extreme production volumes, and business models built entirely on disposability. Temu's score of 10 reflects a company that barely acknowledges sustainability as a concept.

How this compares to sustainable fashion

Even these brands don't score above 60. Fashion is a hard industry to score well in because the physical reality of making, shipping, and eventually disposing of clothing has a significant environmental footprint regardless of intent.

But the gap between Patagonia (52) and SHEIN (15) — 37 points — represents a fundamentally different approach to how clothes are made, sold, and valued.

See the full breakdowns

Every score in the SINK database comes with a detailed 10-question breakdown showing exactly how each company was assessed, with sources and reasoning.

• SHEIN — 15/100
• H&M — 40/100
• Zara (Inditex) — 32/100
• Patagonia — 52/100
• Fashion Nova — 8/100
• Temu — 10/100

Think we got a score wrong? Every score is open to challenge. Find the company, pick a question, submit your evidence. That's how SINK stays accurate.

Browse all 500+ company scores →