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More Sustainable Clothing Brands: The 50 Top-Rated Brands on Good On You

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

12 Jun, 2024

This post was originally published on Good on You

Our editors curate highly rated brands that are first assessed by our rigorous ratings system. Buying through our links may earn us a commission—supporting the work we do. Learn more.

 

Every year, we review the 50 brands that’ve received the highest ratings against our world-leading methodology to give you a comprehensive understanding of who’s doing the most in the industry. But before we get into 2024’s exciting line-up, let’s rewind…

What is Good On You all about?

Since 2015, Good On You has been leading the way in the more sustainable fashion space. First and foremost, we are a brand ratings platform. We rate brands on the environmental impact, labour rights, and animal welfare issues that matter, awarding them an easy-to-understand score from 1 “We Avoid” through to 5 “Great” for each area. We give them an overall score, too.

We believe fashion brands should be responsible for and transparent about their impact. We help to answer questions about how the clothes you’re wearing were made, and whether your favourite brands are doing everything they can to avoid harmful impacts on people, the planet, and animals.

Our ratings system is the most comprehensive in the world that addresses issues across the environment, people, and animals. We collect over 1000 data points per brand across all the key sustainability issues, bringing together a wide range of indicators, ratings, certifications, and standards systems. As of right now, there are thousands of brands listed on our web directory, and in our app.

What makes a brand more sustainable and ethical?

It’s all well and good to say a brand is more ethical and sustainable, but what does that mean in practice? Simply put, a more ethical and sustainable brand makes sure it positively impacts people, the planet, and animals. Here’s an overview of what we look at in each pillar:

Labour conditions

Our people pillar refers to all the hands that touch a garment before it gets to you. From the farmers harvesting the cotton to the workers dyeing fabric and the people packing your orders. A responsible brand ensures its workers are treated fairly across the entire supply chain. This includes policies and practices on child labour, forced labour, supplier contracts, worker voice, gender equality, diversity, the right to join a union, and payment of a living wage.

Environmental impact

For the planet, we want to ensure brands are doing their best to protect the Earth in their production processes. More sustainable brands care about their use of resources and energy, reduce their carbon emissions and impact on our waterways, forests, and biodiversity, and use and dispose of chemicals safely. They incorporate a high proportion of lower-impact materials like linen and recycled cotton, certified by trusted names like the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS).

Animal welfare

The welfare of animals is crucial. Non-human animals are sentient beings we share the planet with and deserve to be treated with respect and, ideally, left alone altogether. A cruelty-free brand uses no or very few animal products, which include wool, leather, fur, angora, down feather, shearling, karakul, and exotic animal skin and hair. Only brands that are 100% vegan are awarded our “Great” score for animals.

Finding more sustainable clothing brands has never been easier

Whether you’re a sustainable fashion aficionado or are new to the sphere, it’s helpful to have a list of brands whose sustainability claims have been rigorously assessed for you. As more brands than ever are celebrating the sustainable practices they have in place, it can be difficult to determine which of those claims have substance and which are just greenwashing—particularly when it comes to fast fashion giants. What’s more, finding brands that meet your needs and values can also present a challenge.

But that’s why Good On You exists. We’ve done the hard work for you and researched, rated, and rounded up the 50 top-scoring more sustainable clothing brands from around the world in this guide. A few brands have made it to the top of our ratings again this year, including “Great” labels Etiko, MUD Jeans, Armedangels, LA Relaxed, Mila.Vert, People Tree, Dedicated, No Nasties, Triarchy, Nudie Jeans, Culthread, Fair Indigo, Citizen Wolf, and Swedish Stockings.

Scroll on to discover the top 50 brands on Good On You, or search the page by region. We hope you meet your new favourite brand.

 

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

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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

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