Inditex is making every effort to present itself as a climate-protection pioneer. Under the slogan “Join Life”, the group is presenting a wide range of sustainability initiatives. For example, in 2021, Zara announced the development of a collection made from recycled carbon emissions and is a member of an initiative promoting clean sea-freight. Inditex likes to report efficiency increases in transport. However, it prefers to remain tight-lipped about the damage caused to the climate by flying its clothes around the globe. 

Inditex is considered a pioneer in the fast-fashion industry and boasts about supplying its 5,815 stores worldwide (as of the end of January 2023) with new clothes twice a week. Brands such as Zara or Pull&Bear can design, produce and deliver a new item in three to four weeks, while many of its competitors plan for months to do this. Short production and delivery times make it possible to reduce fashion cycles to just a few weeks, generating the feeling among consumers that they constantly need something new so that they don’t miss a trend. 

This provides the basis for Zara’s sales strategy, which a former Inditex manager defined years ago as follows: “We want our customers to realise that they have to buy something they like immediately because it may not be available next week. The in-store stock must always be in short supply so that it always seems the right opportunity to buy.” For example, Inditex apparently manages to sell 85 percent of all items at full price – a high rate in the world of cheap fashion. However, this highly profitable business model is also based on low wages on the production side. As Public Eye calculated in 2019, Zara, for example, probably makes more profit from a hoodie than the total combined earnings of all the workers involved in the production process.

Regardless of where they are manufactured, virtually all of Zara & Co.’s products end up in the large distribution centres which the group operates around Zaragoza Airport. There, the garments are ironed, inspected and packed, to be dispatched to stores across the globe. 

According to their 2022 Annual Report, around half of production took place in North Africa, Turkey and the Iberian Peninsula, with the remainder in more remote countries (Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Cambodia, Pakistan and Vietnam). Many clothes sold in countries that Inditex supplies by air (which include numerous important markets – see world maps infographics) have seen the inside of the plane’s cargo hold twice. Compared to other fashion brands, this means that transportation causes significantly more harm to the climate.

As a result, Zaragoza rose to number two among Spain’s cargo airports in 2019. Inditex accounted for 90 percent of the total volume of 183,000 tonnes, according to the regional economic development agency. In 2022, the volume dropped by a good 34 percent after reaching a record high of 194,000 tonnes in 2021, as a result of the war in Ukraine, but probably also because Inditex had closed its 502 stores and online store in Russia, its biggest market after Spain. Before this, Inditex had sent two cargo jumbos from the Russian airline AirBridgeCargo to Moscow every week.

Not everything is transported by plane. Anything that can reach its stores overland from Zaragoza within 36 hours is more likely to be transported by large trucks. This means that stores and online stores in western and central Europe are supplied to some extent by road.

But even within the EU, where air freight offers only a small time-saving, fashionwear is transported by plane. In 2022, at least 42,658 tonnes were delivered by plane (as goods are not cleared through customs within the EU, these statistics are incomplete). One salient statistic is that by far the largest share of these air journeys comes from Spain – 64 percent or 27,392 tonnes to be precise. The main shipper in this case is likely to be Inditex. The main destinations were Greece with 8,034 tonnes and Poland with 5,132 tonnes. Not only does the Zara Group have numerous stores in both countries, but the clothes cannot reach the stores there overland within the 36-hour time-frame desired by Inditex, due to the distance. Based on data from airport operator Aena, these markets are not likely to be served by cargo planes from Zaragoza, but the goods can be transported on passenger flights from Madrid and Barcelona, where Inditex is also a major cargo customer. At Barcelona Airport, the fashion industry has been responsible for the largest cargo volumes for years.

Inditex has recently started using freight trains, running from Sète in the south of France to Poznan in Poland, to deliver to the warehouse used to receive online orders in central Europe. On the return journey, IKEA uses the same train composition to transport furniture made in Poland to Spain. This saves a total of 12,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year, which is a good start, but only a drop in the ocean.

In 2022, the Group awarded orders worth €1.25 billion to 170 factories in Bangladesh. This information comes from a letter sent by the head of Inditex Bangladesh to a local authority, which was published by the local financial portal “The Finance Today”. According to customs data, Inditex has delivered at least 16 percent of this volume to Dhaka airport as air freight. From January to August 2023, the figure even reached 22.8 percent.

But that’s not all. According to a trade magazine, Inditex also transports ready-made garments by truck to Delhi, India, from where they are flown to Zaragoza on Atlas Air cargo jumbos. The reason for this is apparently recurring capacity problems at Dhaka Airport, where ready-made garments account for 85 percent of cargo volumes. Inditex flexes its negotiating muscles in these situations, buying up to 70 percent of the cargo capacity of Dhaka Airport, a fact that Inditex has not refuted.

The true absurdity of Inditex airborne fashion is revealed by taking a look at the pricing, which is also evident from the customs data. A major supplier in Bangladesh with around 6,000 employees mainly manufactures women’s T-shirts for Zara, producing from January to August of this year – according to customs data – almost 10 million items. A quarter of them arrived in Spain by air, often via Doha or Dubai.

Inditex only pays this supplier around CHF 1.90 (USD 2.10) per shirt. If large volumes of clothing are shipped by sea, the transport costs per garment are usually only a few pennies! Unlike air freight, which is expensive. Due to the pandemic, prices have fluctuated strongly in recent years, with the minimum cost likely to be CHF 1.50 per kilo. However, that would only represent the cost from Bangladesh to Spain. If the goods were flown from there to a US branch, for example, the freight costs would continue to rise. 

A popular argument used to justify air freight is the high value of the goods. But according to data from the Barcelona tax office, airborne fashion has a value of just under € 18 per kilo when imported, which rises to € 41.50 when exported. This is in stark contrast to pharmaceuticals and chemicals, where the export value in Barcelona is just under € 120.

Even though, as a massive customer of the cargo airlines, Inditex certainly receives discounts, the additional air transport costs per shirt are likely to be at least CHF 0.20 to 0.40. By way of comparison, the prices paid by Inditex and other retailers in Bangladesh are so paltry that, after deducting material and energy costs of around 70 percent, there is hardly anything left to distribute. The latest annual report from the above-mentioned supplier also shows that only 18 percent of revenues, i.e. just CHF 0.34 for a typical Zara shirt, are included as direct wage costs.

Inditex’s response reflects the fact that the air cargo industry is relying primarily on technical innovation in tackling the climate crisis. Minimal improvements are made by using slightly more efficient aircraft. The rest is based on hope, because technical innovations, such as fuels from renewable energy sources, do not yet exist or at least not on an industrial scale. That's why the industry’s focus is currently on non-binding initiatives and offset projects such as CORSIA, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not see this as a suitable instrument, as it writes in its sixth report: “By its nature, CORSIA does not lead to a reduction in in-sector emissions from aviation since the programme deals mostly in approved offsets. At its best, CORSIA is a transition arrangement to allow aviation to reduce its impact in a more meaningful way later.” 

In a nutshell, for at least as long as the hoped-for technical innovation is not available, it would be much more expedient to drastically reduce the volume of air freight and only transport by plane really important items, such as medicines, express airmail, spare parts etc. Fashion is definitely not included among these items. And it would continue to be available in stores even without the use of air freight. Only fast fashion trends would take a few weeks longer to appear in shop windows. This kind of slow-down would not produce a loss, but an opportunity for more conscious consumption and more sustainable designs.