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Fashion Week tries on carbon offsets

Jennifer Collins Feb 15, 2010
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Fashion Week tries on carbon offsets

Jennifer Collins Feb 15, 2010
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TEXT OF STORY

Bill Radke: The parade of new clothing designs known as Fashion Week is underway in New York. And this year, the event aims to go carbon neutral. From the Marketplace Sustainability Desk, Jennifer Collins reports on Fashion Week’s embrace of the carbon offset.


Jennifer Collins: Carbon offsets work like this: You pay for someone to cut back their carbon emissions to make up for your own.

Fashion Week is snipping away at its carbon footprint by paying dairy farms in Idaho to capture a particularly unfashionable byproduct: Methane.

Ed Klein: They use that methane for energy?

Ed Klein is with Tetra Pak, the company paying about $20,000 for Fashion Week’s offsets:

Klein: And because this project wouldn’t have taken place without additional funding, that means that we are having a real impact on climate change.

But Renee Morin says, not so fast. She’s with the consulting company Clear Carbon. Morin says these offsets take the focus away from all the carbon emitted from the tents and lights and thumping runway music — not to mention the air travel it takes to get the models there. And ,she says, they may prevent Fashion Week from:

Renee Morin: Hopefully also addressing down the line how to make it more energy-efficient.

Which Morin hopes will become the new item in vogue.

I’m Jennifer Collins for Marketplace.

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