Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard believes that unbounded growth puts undue stress on the planet, and that business must find innovative ways to reduce its footprint. His longtime climbing buddy Rick Ridgeway is the outdoor-clothing company’s sustainability head, and as such is charged with spurring this innovation (he was also on the first American team to climb the 28,251-foot mountain K2, and he did it without an oxygen tank). Ridgeway spoke with Brian Dumaine and answered readers’ questions.
Q: What, specifically, is Patagonia doing about the environment?
Ridgeway: We are launching a campaign we’re calling the Responsible Economy. It’s about the role consumption plays in the continued decline in our planet’s health. One of our advertisements reads, “Don’t buy this jacket.”
Discouraging your customers from buying doesn’t sound to me like capitalism.
At first it sounds crazy: How can any business thrive in an economy of negative growth? We think there may be a different form of capitalism that can wean us off growth and improve the planet’s health.
That’s a tough challenge. Most surveys show that while consumers care about green, they’re not willing to pay for it.
Our answer is, if we can get an increasing number of citizens to begin to pay attention to this megatrend of environmental stress, they will commit to quality products that last a long time and don’t end up in a landfill after a few months. We want to be the company that provides those quality products.
So how are you going to change the consumer mindset?
We’re asking our customers to take mutual responsibility with us for the lifetime of a product and its full environmental footprint.
So how does that work in practice?
Our mantra is “reduce, repair, resell, and recycle.” First we’d like you to think twice about buying new clothes. If a Patagonia jacket is ripped or has a bad zipper, bring it back to us and we’ll fix it. We’re just now starting to train our store associates to make minor repairs. For major fixes we have a sophisticated repair shop in Reno. We’ll also help you resell your used clothes. We have a partnership with eBay. If you place a Patagonia product on its website, we will market the product on our website for no charge. If a garment is truly worn out, we’ll recycle it.
Reader Questions
Stephen Denny: In an industry where sustainable products (like cotton) are vastly inferior to unsustainable versions (like polyester), how important are the tradeoffs where performance is involved?
Traditionally grown cotton is far from sustainable. On a global basis cotton accounts for over 10% of all pesticides used in agriculture. It takes over 300 gallons of water to make a pair of jeans, for example, and the majority of that is growing the cotton. To mitigate that problem we source our organic cotton from farms watered by rainfall instead of from a dammed river or a deplenishing aquifer. But clothes made from polyester that, in turn, is sourced from recycled polyester can have the lowest footprint of all. That’s why we lean on our customers, through our Common Threads Partnership, to bring back their worn-out polyester clothes to recycle.
Alinafe Banda Mwanza: What is the best way forward?
If we can extend the polyester-recycling concept to other fibers, both synthetic but also natural, we can do much to further reduce the footprint of the products produced by the apparel industry.
Have more questions? Tweet us @FortuneMagazine #FortuneQs.
This story is from the September 16, 2013 issue of Fortune.