Nordic ImpACT Week’ focusing on sustainability in the clothing industry.

Maja and Karoline share how they shed light on the sustainability challenges in the clothing industry during Nordic ImpACT Week.

10 per cent of man-made carbon emissions come from the clothing industry and the clothing consumption has quadrupled over the last 20 years. We can do something to change that!

During EY Nordic ImpACT Week this year, we wanted to shed light on the sustainability challenges of today’s clothing industry. It all began when we got in touch with Tise, who wanted a collaboration with a larger company with a special commitment to sustainability. They wanted to inspire more people to choose second-hand clothes through their new concept Tise Treasurs, and we thought that it was something that would create engagement among our colleagues.

Who are we?

Maja Sjøvold Aune is a senior consultant within Business Transformation at our Oslo Office. She founded BIEN, Norway’s sustainability forum together with Karoline Sand Haarberg and Marita Vogt. The forum aims to gain and share knowledge about sustainability and how we work with and implement this across service lines and competence areas in EY. In addition, the forum works as a meeting place for “sustainability agents” who inspire each other to start their own sustainability initiatives. Maja is motivated by working with things with at deeper meaning.

Karoline Sand Haarberg is a senior sustainability consultant in CCaSS (Climate change and sustainability services) at the Oslo office and is also a co-founder of BIEN. She works in EY’s sustainability department on projects towards a more sustainable world. She is, herself, an avid user of Tise and other second-hand markets and aims to make sustainable choices in her everyday life. Karoline has furnished her entire apartment with second-hand furniture!

Throughout the autumn of 2022, we were joined by Klara Stiebel, Signe Flaa and Julia Furulund in setting up a lecture with Tise to learn more about the challenges of the industry and what Tise is doing to create solutions to these challenges. We had many conversations with Tise on why this is so important and how we can encourage more people to make their wardrobes more sustainable. We agreed that the best way to show how easy and fun it can be to buy used clothes, was precisely to let our colleagues do it at the event itself! Therefore, we decided to combine the Tise lecture with a separate EY clothes swap market, where our colleagues could exchange and buy clothes from each other.

We wanted to inspire other EY offices in the Nordics to do the same, and therefore created a template on how we organized the clothing market. That led to other offices in the Nordics also organizing clothing swap markets and more than 60 EY employees participated in the Tise lecture digitally from offices around the Nordics.

Ahead of the event, we picked up used clothes racks and mirrors from finn.no, collected clothes at the office for a whole week, and collaborated with both Tise and the Red Cross to be able to donate the clothes that were not sold or exchanged.

The event was a great success, with more than 70 participants during Tise's lecture and more than 200 items of clothing exchanged, sold or donated to the Red Cross.

We have received a lot of positive feedback from our colleagues, who found the initiative to be both educational, useful and fun. Therefore, we do not rule out the possibility of more clothing exchange markets being set up at EY in the future.