Zeitz said that having a clear breakdown of where and how Puma pollutes will help the company clean up its act.
The EP&L shows that raw materials account for the lion's share of brand's total environmental impact: production of water-thirsty cotton and rubber and land-devouring leather alone was behind 57 percent of the company's total impact, the balance sheet found. Possible changes to improve those numbers could include moving the sourcing of water-intensive raw materials from arid counties to rainier ones or finding a way to re-use scraps and other left-overs that might normally be thrown out, Zietz said.
Still, changes are difficult to implement precisely because of the gap between the company and its far-flung, sometimes opaque suppliers, which often provision hundreds or even thousands of different brands.
By 2015, the company aims to source 50 percent of its raw materials from suppliers that meet its sustainability criteria, said Zeitz, who has also been named PPR's Chief Sustainability Officer at Puma's parent company, luxury conglomerate PPR.
Still, not everyone is eager to see "green accounting" widely applied.
"You can imagine there are a lot of industrialists who aren't keen to have this adopted," Preston said. "Their numbers would be mind-boggling."
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