Green Procurement Challenges and Strategy for Sustainability: The case of Fast Retailing

The fast-fashion industry faces significant environmental and social challenges, underscoring the need for green procurement as an essential tool for translating sustainability commitments into measurable results. This thesis analyzes Fast Retailing's green procurement implementation, evaluates the effectiveness of existing strategies and goals, and identifies design actions to bridge the gap between policy intent and portfolio-level outcomes. A qualitative single-case design integrates directed content analysis of corporate disclosures with thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews. A codebook based on theory and refined by the empirical data, in addition to an auditable evidence matrix, organized six themes: materials and product design; carbon and climate commitments; transparency and traceability; human rights and ethical sourcing; procurement governance and strategy; and performance and disclosure quality. This structure facilitates the correlation of numerical indicators with practitioner mechanisms while maintaining traceability. Findings demonstrate significant progress in contexts with a well-defined measurement framework, defined by stable units and denominators, consistent observation, and external validation. Decarbonisation within owned operations is clear, with an expansion in renewable-electricity contracting and close to completion of recycled-polyester substitution. Environmental compliance at core garment facilities has matured under established wastewater and chemical management standards. In contrast, upstream initiatives are mainly descriptive due to the absence of portfolio denominators: the decarbonization of process heat at fabric mills (Tier-2) is not monitored through a standardized time-series indicator, and wood-based material schemes are documented in policy without consistent quantification of portfolios. Interviews identify these gaps as resulting from capital intensity, jurisdictional and infrastructure limitations, inconsistent data beyond Tier-1, and assurance designs that emphasize pass/fail conformity over process performance. The study concludes that effectiveness is influenced more by metric design that aligns targets with procurement levers and supplier execution than by the scope of the program. Priority actions include establishing a Tier-2 heat indicator with regular, externally verified reporting; transforming upstream material policies into quantifiable portfolio coverage; and transitioning wet-processing oversight from a binary compliance framework to an intensity-based performance approach. The findings, based on a single-company case utilizing public disclosures and a limited interview sample, support analytic rather than statistical generalization. Future research should broaden the framework to encompass multiple brands, incorporate supplier-level energy data to quantify upstream heat transitions, and evaluate the financial viability of country-specific mill decarbonization pathways.