Sustainable Sportswear: How TCU Grad Kim Drenner Enforces Patagonia’s Environmental Standards

WHEN YOUR COMPANY’S MOTTO IS “WE’RE IN BUSINESS TO SAVE OUR HOME PLANET,” sustainability isn’t just a goal, it is a core value. Patagonia, the American outdoor retailer, is as well-known and respected for its activism on environmental issues as it is for its durable, high-quality clothing and gear.

As head of environmental impact for Patagonia, Kim Drenner ’08 (MS ’10) leads initiatives to reduce pollution and carbon emissions and to strengthen environmental accountability and awareness. Her impact ranges from Patagonia’s own facilities to its global supply chain and ripples across the outdoor goods industry.

ENVIRONMENTAL FOCUS

Drenner grew up in Arlington, Texas, in a family who loved the outdoors. She was awed by the high desert landscape of Taos, New Mexico, where her family frequently skied. During annual family trips to Hawaii, she explored the reefs and the rainforest.

Arriving at TCU in fall 2004 as a soccer recruit, Drenner played for the Horned Frogs and planned to major in journalism. But that changed after she took a course in contemporary issues in environmental science taught by Mike Slattery, professor, director of research in the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute and director of the Institute for Environmental Studies.

Kim Drenner helps shape efforts to reduce the environmental impact of apparel manufacturing industry-wide.

“Mike is such a charismatic, passionate individual and scientist, always so inspiring,” Drenner said. “He is always thinking creatively about how to get students engaged.”

The following summer, she joined Slattery’s study abroad course in Costa Rica, where she visited a remote research station in a cloud forest.

“It was so insightful to not only see the beauty in nature,” she said, “but to understand the issues the country was managing in transforming from a resource extraction-based economy [farming, logging] to an ecotourism-based model as a way to protect the landscape.”

That pivotal experience spurred her to major in environmental science — and to help write a grant that secured funding to maintain the research station for TCU students.

Drenner took an internship during her senior year as an environmental, occupational health and safety associate at Fort Worth’s Bell Helicopter.

“That was a great experience in understanding how a company manages their environmental footprint,” she said, “and how you get the people making the product, versus the executives, to care.”

Two opportunities enticed Drenner to stay at TCU for a master’s degree.

First, Slattery invited her to study abroad in England at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. She heard lectures by world-renowned scientists and attended her first climate change protest, held at a self-sustaining village constructed by activists next to a proposed fossil energy project.

Second, she returned to the research station in Costa Rica. For her thesis research, she rose at sunrise each day to survey trees in the dense forest as part of her analysis of biodiversity. She evaluated whether a payment system for biodiversity could incentivize landowners to keep their forests intact instead of clearing them for industry.

“Kim was curious, an important trait for any student,” said Slattery, who served as one of her thesis advisers. “She was also hardworking and engaged. But if I had to sum up her traits in one word, it would be ‘resilience.’ She never once said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ She just found a way.”

Drenner gravitated toward environmental compliance thanks in part to another TCU mentor: Becky Johnson ’95 MS, a professor of professional practice with a long career in environmental consulting. Johnson taught her about environmental management systems and how to address pollution from industry, which would become fixtures of Drenner’s career.

DIG IN, ASK QUESTIONS

In 2012, Drenner took a job in Vancouver, British Columbia, joining the climate change and sustainability services team at EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young and one of the Big Four consulting firms.

Over four and a half years, she audited and advised large companies across Canada, working in industries including mining, oil and gas, government, finance and forestry. “I feel like I got to see more of Canada than a lot of Canadians,” she said, “always during the coldest time of year, too.”

“I asked, ‘Why are we talking about using carbon offsets when we’re still polluting halfway across the world in our supply chain?’ ”
Kim Drenner

She visited remote industrial facilities to see their manufacturing processes firsthand and evaluate their pollution management practices.

“The Big Four audit process is very rigorous,” she said, explaining that it requires quickly learning the technicalities of each industry enough to ask precise questions about the source, measurement and integrity of emissions data. “You have to be very open to digging in, asking a ton of questions and learning from everyone around you. I feel that has helped me as I’ve progressed in my career.”

As a longtime Patagonia customer — the quarter-zip R1 Air fleece is her favorite piece — Drenner was thrilled to join the company in 2018 as a supply chain environmental responsibility manager at its headquarters in Ventura, California.

“I felt like the position was written just for me,” she said. Her EY experience prepared her well for improving Patagonia’s process for auditing its vast supply chain. “Most people don’t realize we don’t own our supply chain,” Drenner said. “These are all completely separate businesses, and, in most cases, we are less than 5 percent of their total production.”

Patagonia’s supply chain includes dozens of suppliers worldwide. They are all vetted and audited for environmental impact.

In her first year, Drenner traveled the world, including to Morocco, Mexico, Spain and Portugal. One of her most memorable site visits was in South America, where she was excited to see that a supplier was using high-quality regenerative organic-certified cotton but alarmed to discover a potential spinning and dyeing vendor was discharging hazardous wastewater.

“It was so motivating to hear our owners say, ‘We won’t make this product until we can get the supply chain right,’ ” she said.

It took about five years to find an alternative supplier in the region that could meet Patagonia’s environmental standards.

“When you see suppliers whose values are aligned with ours, who go back and make the investment to get where we want them to be, that’s so impactful,” Drenner said. “It helps the industry, because we do so much groundwork that benefits all the other brands.”

On the Outdoor Industry Association’s Sustainability Advisory Council, Drenner has collaborated with peers from other brands, both large and small, on reducing environmental impact.

After serving as Patagonia’s head of supply chain environmental responsibility for two years, Drenner was promoted to head of environmental impact in 2022.

She now leads a global team that measures Patagonia’s environmental impact and implements programs to reduce that impact. Drenner served as an adviser on the Fashion Acts, legislation in New York and California aimed at increasing accountability in the fashion industry. She also partners with Patagonia’s product teams to source more sustainable materials and with the marketing team to ensure that all environmental claims are accurate and verifiable.

“We try to keep the company honest and truthful because this is an industry where there is a lot of greenwashing,” she said. “Greenwashing is saying your company is doing something sustainable when it isn’t.”

Drenner’s proudest achievement is a large-scale decarbonization effort to reduce emissions from the material manufacturers that account for some 90 percent of Patagonia’s carbon footprint. The company considered using carbon offsets, such as reforestation, to balance out emissions. “I asked, ‘Why are we talking about using carbon offsets when we’re still polluting halfway across the world in our supply chain?’ ” she said.

She worked with Patagonia’s executive team and finance department to create an internal impact fund to enable Patagonia’s decarbonization work, supporting suppliers by covering 100 percent of the costs of conducting energy and carbon audits, adopting renewable energy sources, and switching their boilers from coal to electric. Patagonia, in partnership with the Outdoor Industry Association, sponsored first-of-its-kind research to ensure electrification could work in the textile industry, then shared its findings with the public.

Drenner partners with the Outdoor Industry Association to share Patagonia’s research and best practices publicly, leveraging the company’s influence to push competitors toward stronger environmental standards.

“This is an incredibly complex challenge that most would expect to take years, but Kim developed and implemented a plan in under two years,” said Eric Cheng, a supply chain environmental impact program manager who has worked with Drenner throughout her tenure at Patagonia. “The project reflects Kim’s signature working style: thorough research, strategic planning and actionable solutions to address some of the most complicated environmental issues.”

Drenner and her team are propelling the company toward an ambitious goal of net zero emissions by 2040. She hopes other outdoors companies will continue to follow Patagonia’s lead on decarbonization and amplify the positive environmental impact for everyone’s home planet.

“Our voice, our influence in the industry is massive,” Drenner said. “People listen to us; we don’t take that for granted.”