Search

Good On You’s Year in Review: Our 2024 Highlights

We are an online community created around a smart and easy to access information hub which is focused on providing proven global and local insights about sustainability

20 Dec, 2024

This post was originally published on Good on You

2024 marked a major moment for Good On You as we expanded into beauty ratings—but we’ve reached many more milestones, too. Here’s what the Good On You team achieved this year.

Good On You evolved in 2024

Anyone in the sustainability space will tell you that 2024 has been a tough year. Challenging economies and uncertainty about what new governments and legislation will mean for the climate and sustainable business in 2025 have made for a tumultuous period—and McKinsey’s annual State of Fashion report predicts it’s not going to get easier, at least in the short term. But through it all, Good On You has remained steadfast in its mission to help you make better choices, and support brands in working more sustainably. Here are our milestones from 2024.

Good On You launched beauty brand ratings

The headline this year? In October 2024, we issued an urgent call for improvement in beauty sustainability with the launch of beauty brand ratings and the first industry-wide study into brand sustainability initiatives.

Its findings revealed that brands are lagging in their efforts to minimise impacts on people, the planet, and animals, and to provide the transparency that consumers have a right to. Even when beauty brands are transparent, “there’s a shocking amount of information that’s not disclosed about where all of our products come from—and even the specific ingredients that go in them,” writes editor-at-large JD Shadel.  The industry took notice, too, and you might’ve seen coverage by the Financial TimesVogue Business, and Business of Fashion, among other outlets that reported on the news.

We made waves in physical retail with the launch of the Sustainable Retail Index in partnership with URW

Our partnership with Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW)—the operators of Westfield in the EU and US—reached new heights in 2024 as we co-created the Sustainable Retail Index (SRI), an industry-pioneering tool powered by Good On You’s rich brand sustainability data. The SRI will provide URW with a unified way to support its retailer tenants in their sustainability transitions and track their performances, and to meet consumer expectations for more responsible choices throughout its destinations. In creating the SRI, our analysts rated more than 1,000 fashion brands in just eight weeks, we launched beauty ratings, and are working on three new retail verticals.

Our monthly industry newsletter is bringing insights to a new audience

In November, we launched a new monthly digest to bring retailers, innovative brands, and industry insiders access to new ratings data, thought leadership from voices in fashion and beauty, actionable tips, and the latest industry news. We kicked off with an essay from our co-founder Sandra Capponi, who shared her experience with the ongoing transparency crisis and what brands can do to avoid it. Want to get these insights in your inbox? Sign up here.

We’re mentoring the next generation of designers in partnership with the British Fashion Council

Helping the industry do better is the heart of our mission, and we’ve partnered with the British Fashion Council to guide emerging fashion brands as part of the organisation’s NEWGEN programme. We’ll be helping NEWGEN recipients finesse their sustainability approaches by offering access to our team of experts and our Good Measures hub, providing a 360-degree view of their impacts and tailored tips for improvement.

Our reporting asked big questions

We published 193 articles in 2024 and partnered with some of the industry’s most prominent voices to bring you original reporting. Writer Maggie Zhou quizzed SHEIN and Temu directly about their alleged copyright infringement, while journalist Sophie Benson investigated why it’s so hard to find out what ingredients are in our beauty products, journalist Megan Doyle interviewed those spearheading physical retail’s transformation into a place for circularity, and activist Emma Håkansson examined what cruelty-free claims in the beauty industry really mean. And we harnessed our ratings analysts’ expertise to help you understand why cultural sustainability is so important and what good—and bad—sustainability reporting looks like.

We released our annual climate change report, the largest survey of its kind in the industry

For the past two years, we’ve collaborated with journalist Sophie Benson on our deep data reports for the world’s annual climate conference, COP. For COP29, Benson looked at new data on more than 5,800 brands’ environmental track records and highlighted the fashion industry’s ongoing lack of urgency regarding the climate emergency.

We scaled up our business tools to help more brands do better

This year, we did a full redesign of the Good On You Ratings Dashboard to give our enterprise partners instant access to a credible assessment of the fashion and beauty brands they work with on the most critical sustainability issues. It includes the Ratings API, too, so developers can incorporate our ratings easily into existing platforms and websites to power decision-making and help consumers make better choices. Alongside that, our network of “Good” and “Great” affiliate brands continues to thrive, and we grew our publisher network to over 100 members, helping them to share top-rated brands with their audiences and scaling up our collective impact.

We contributed to the most important conferences and forums

Every year, Good On You’s founders actively participate in crucial industry forums, to further our commitment to transparency and accountability. From the Marie Claire Awards to the Textile Exchange board, our involvement affirmed our role as thought leaders, advocates, and champions of change in fashion and beauty.

 

2024 in numbers

2024 statistics for good on you

Most searched brands in 2024

most searched brands on good on you 2024 - shein, nike, and h&m

All in all, it’s been another fantastic year for Good On You, and it’s all down to you.

So thank you. Thank you for your support and for helping us change the fashion—and now beauty—industries for the better, even when times are tough. We couldn’t do what we do without you, and we can’t wait to see what next year has in store for us and the sustainability movement as a whole. We’re so glad to have you here as we head into 2025—our decade anniversary!

Want to learn more about Good On You’s milestones? Check out our 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 highlights.

 

The post Good On You’s Year in Review: Our 2024 Highlights appeared first on Good On You.

Pass over the stars to rate this post. Your opinion is always welcome.
[Total: 0 Average: 0]

You may also like…

‘Poisoning the Well’ Authors Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin on PFAS Contamination and Why It ‘Has Not Received the Attention It Deserves’

‘Poisoning the Well’ Authors Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin on PFAS Contamination and Why It ‘Has Not Received the Attention It Deserves’

In the introduction to Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin’s new book, Poisoning The Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, the authors cite an alarming statistic from 2015 that PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are present in the bodies of an estimated 97% of Americans. How did we ever get to this point? Their book is […]
The post ‘Poisoning the Well’ Authors Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin on PFAS Contamination and Why It ‘Has Not Received the Attention It Deserves’ appeared first on EcoWatch.

Turning down the heat: how innovative cooling techniques are tackling the rising costs of AI's energy demands

Turning down the heat: how innovative cooling techniques are tackling the rising costs of AI's energy demands

As enterprises accelerate their AI investments, the energy demand of AI’s power-hungry systems is worrying both the organisations footing the power bills as well as those tasked with supplying reliable electricity. From large language models to digital twins crunching massive datasets to run accurate simulations on complex city systems, AI workloads require a tremendous amount of processing power.

Of course, at the heart of this demand are data centres, which are evolving at breakneck speed to support AI’s growing potential. The International Energy Agency’s AI and Energy Special Report recently predicted that data centre electricity consumption will double by 2030, identifying AI as the most significant driver of this increase.1

The IT leaders examining these staggering predictions are rightly zeroing in on improving the efficiency of these powerful systems. However, the lack of expertise in navigating these intricate systems, combined with the rapidity of innovative developments, is causing heads to spin. Although savvy organisations are baking efficiency considerations into IT projects at the outset, and are looking across the entire AI life cycle for opportunities to minimise impact, many don’t know where to start or are leaving efficiency gains on the table. Most are underutilising the multiple IT efficiency levers that could be pulled to reduce the environmental footprint of their IT, such as using energy-efficient software languages and optimising data use to ensure maximum data efficiency of AI workloads. Among the infrastructure innovations, one of the most exciting advancements we are seeing in data centres is direct liquid cooling (DLC). Because the systems that are running AI workloads are producing more heat, traditional air cooling simply is not enough to keep up with the demands of the superchips in the latest systems.

DLC technology pumps liquid coolants through tubes in direct contact with the processors to dissipate heat and has been proven to keep high-powered AI systems running safely. Switching to DLC has had measurable and transformative impact across multiple environments, showing reductions in cooling power consumption by nearly 90% compared to air cooling in supercomputing systems2.

Thankfully, the benefits of DLC are now also extending beyond supercomputers to reach a broader range of higher-performance servers that support both supercomputing and AI workloads. Shifting DLC from a niche offering to a more mainstream option available across more compute systems is enabling more organisations to tap into the efficiency gains made possible by DLC, which in some cases has been shown to deliver up to 65% in annual power savings3. Combining this kind of cooling innovation with new and improved power-use monitoring tools, able report highly accurate and timely insights, is becoming critical for IT teams wanting to optimise their energy use. All this is a welcome evolution for organisations grappling with rising energy costs and that are carefully considering total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT systems, and is an area of innovation to watch in the coming years.

In Australia, this kind of technical innovation is especially timely. In March 2024, the Australian Senate established the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence to examine the opportunities and impacts of AI technologies4. Among its findings and expert submissions was a clear concern about the energy intensity of AI infrastructure. The committee concluded that the Australian Government legislate for increased regulatory clarity, greater energy efficiency standards, and increased investment in renewable energy solutions. For AI sustainability to succeed, it must be driven by policy to set actionable standards, which then fuel innovative solutions.

Infrastructure solutions like DLC will play a critical role in making this possible — not just in reducing emissions and addressing the energy consumption challenge, but also in supporting the long-term viability of AI development across sectors. We’re already seeing this approach succeed in the real world. For example, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia has adopted DLC technology to support its demanding research workloads and, in doing so, has significantly reduced energy consumption while maintaining the high performance required for AI and scientific computing. It’s a powerful example of how AI data centres can scale sustainably — and telegraphs an actionable blueprint for others to follow.

Furthermore, industry leaders are shifting how they handle the heat generated by these large computing systems in order to drive further efficiency in AI. Successfully using heat from data centres for other uses will be a vital component to mitigating both overall energy security risks and the efficiency challenges that AI introduces. Data centres are being redesigned to capture by-product heat and use it as a valuable resource, rather than dispose of it as waste heat. Several industries are already benefiting from capturing data centre heat, such as in agriculture for greenhouses, or heating buildings in healthcare and residential facilities. This has been successfully implemented in the UK with the Isambard-AI supercomputer and in Finland with the LUMI supercomputer — setting the bar for AI sustainability best practice globally.

The message is clear: as AI becomes a bigger part of digital transformation projects, so too must the consideration for resource-efficient solutions grow. AI sustainability considerations must be factored into each stage of the AI life cycle, with solutions like DLC playing a part in in a multifaceted IT sustainability blueprint.

By working together with governments to set effective and actionable environmental frameworks and benchmarks, we can encourage the growth and evolution of the AI industry, spurring dynamic innovation in solutions and data centre design for the benefit of all.

1. AI is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres while offering the potential to transform how the energy sector works – News – IEA
2. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/blog-post/2024/08/liquid-cooling-a-cool-approach-for-ai.html
3. HPE introduces next-generation ProLiant servers engineered for advanced security, AI automation and greater performance
4. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Adopting_Artificial_Intelligence_AI

Image credit: iStock.com/Dragon Claws

The Rise of Chemical Recycling: What Recyclers Should Know

The Rise of Chemical Recycling: What Recyclers Should Know

During WWII, plastic appeared as a “material with 1,000 uses.” Fast forward to today, when global production of plastic has surpassed 359 million tons. While plastic has been helpful in many areas, it’s also created problems within the environment. Microscopic particles of plastic are in the soil, air, and water. They’re in animals, fish, and […]
The post The Rise of Chemical Recycling: What Recyclers Should Know appeared first on RecycleNation.

0 Comments