Decathlon Sustainability: SBTi Targets, Circularity and the Growth Paradox

Decathlon has set absolute emissions-reduction targets, even though its revenue still depends on selling new products.

A retailer's emissions and its revenue both rise with the number of products it sells. For a company built on high volume, reducing absolute emissions and increasing sales work against each other. Decathlon, the world's largest sporting-goods retailer, has committed to doing both.

The French group reported revenue of roughly €16.2 billion in 2024 and employs more than 100,000 people across about 80 markets. Since 1976 its strategy has been to make equipment for dozens of sports and price it low enough to widen access to them. That approach depends on high unit volumes, and those volumes, spread across textiles, metals, plastics and global freight, are the principal source of the company's environmental impact.

Over the past three years Decathlon has changed how it sets and measures its climate goals, moving from targets that track efficiency to targets that track total emissions. Those commitments, and the structural limits on meeting them, define the company's current position.

 

From intensity to absolutes

 

Until recently Decathlon measured progress mainly in terms of intensity: emissions per euro of sales. An intensity figure can fall while a company's total emissions rise, provided sales grow faster than emissions. The company now sets absolute targets, which track the total quantity of emissions regardless of sales.

In 2023 Decathlon submitted targets to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the most widely used external validator of corporate climate goals. The SBTi confirmed them in March 2024 as consistent with a 1.5°C pathway. Decathlon commits to cutting absolute Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse-gas emissions by 42% by 2030 against a 2021 baseline, and to reaching net zero across its value chain by 2050, defined as a 90% absolute reduction with the remaining emissions neutralized. The company also reports earning an "A" on CDP's 2024 climate questionnaire, its first appearance on that list.

Absolute targets matter for Decathlon because of where its emissions originate. By the company's own accounting, the large majority fall under Scope 3, the indirect emissions in its supply chain and products, and raw-material extraction and manufacturing account for 60.7% of its total footprint. Most of the impact occurs before a product reaches a store, in material production and at supplier factories. Measures limited to stores and offices, such as on-site renewable energy, therefore address only a small part of the total. Product design, rather than store or transport operations, is where Decathlon can influence its footprint most.

Raw materials and manufacturing make up 60.7% of Decathlon's carbon footprint. Most of its emissions are determined at the design stage, before a product is ever sold, which is why design is a larger lever than store or transport operations.

 

The vertical-integration advantage

 

Decathlon designs and manufactures most of what it sells under its own brands rather than reselling other labels. Controlling design gives it control over many of the decisions that determine a product's emissions: the choice of material, the dyeing process, how a product is assembled and whether it can be repaired.

This is the basis of the company's "ecodesign" approach, which it says applied to 48.5% of products sold in 2024, about ten percentage points higher than the year before, with a stated aim of reaching 100%. The measures are specific: greater use of recycled and lower-impact materials, designs that use less material, dyeing methods that consume less water, and a commitment to remove coal from its top-tier suppliers by 2025 and the next tier by 2030. These are incremental engineering changes rather than headline initiatives, which is consistent with how supply-chain emissions are reduced.

This is also the part of the strategy that is easiest to defend. A company that owns its product specifications can reduce the emissions associated with those products in a way a pure reseller cannot. Decathlon reports reducing its absolute carbon emissions while growing sales in two consecutive years. If that record holds, it would indicate the company is decoupling emissions from growth rather than only improving its efficiency ratios.

We once again succeeded in decoupling growth from CO2 output. - Barbara Martin Coppola, Decathlon CEO, 2022–2025

 

Circularity as a business model

 

Decathlon's second priority is to make circular activities, resale, repair, rental and recycling, a source of revenue rather than a corporate-responsibility programme.

The supporting infrastructure is substantial:

• Repair. An in-store network the company puts at more than 1,700 workshops, staffed by thousands of technicians.
• Resale. Second-life products recovered from rentals and trade-ins, sold across dozens of countries.
• Buy-back. A service through which customers sell used equipment back to Decathlon.
• Rental. Gear offered through both short-term and subscription models.

Two further signals indicate that Decathlon treats these activities as a commercial line rather than a reporting exercise: it has set a target for 30% of its products to be repairable by 2026, and it now includes circular sales in its financial reporting.

The scale remains modest. Circular activities grew 10.4% in 2024, faster than new-product sales, but still accounted for only about 3% of group revenue. Decathlon executives have stated publicly that this is far short of what is needed, and the company has said it wants circular services to become a core revenue stream measured in double digits; academic case studies of its strategy describe an aim to grow circular sales several times over. By Decathlon's own description, it is at the start of this transition rather than well into it.

The difficulty is structural. Repair, durability and resale are ways of selling fewer new products to the same customer, so the company is attempting to grow circular revenue while its main business still depends on new-product sales. Reverse logistics, refurbishment, grading and warranties on used goods add cost and complexity that a high-volume retail operation is not built for. Whether these services become profitable at scale, or remain loss-making, will determine how far Decathlon can take the model.

Repair, resale and rental all work by selling fewer new products to the same customer. Decathlon is trying to grow that revenue while its core business still depends on new-product sales, which is the central tension in its strategy.

 

The credibility gap

 

Decathlon's climate commitments have been validated externally, but its consumer-facing communication has drawn regulatory criticism.

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), reviewing the clothing and sporting-goods sector, found that Decathlon, along with H&M, had made sustainability claims that were unclear and insufficiently substantiated, citing broad terms such as "Ecodesign" used without explaining the specific benefit. Decathlon agreed to revise its claims and, by its own account, removed environmental labels from products until the claims could be supported by data. The term at issue, ecodesign, is the same concept that sits at the centre of the company's most credible climate work.

The case points to a distinction the sustainability debate often blurs. A target validated by the SBTi and a label printed on a product are assessed in different ways. The first is checked against a defined methodology; the second is a marketing decision repeated across a large catalogue. A company can be accurate at the level of corporate strategy and overstate at the level of the individual product, and European regulation of environmental claims has tightened around precisely that second category.

Independent assessments reflect this mixed picture. The ethical-fashion rating platform Good On You places Decathlon at "It's a Start," crediting its science-based target and its use of some lower-impact materials while noting there is not yet clear evidence the company is on track. The structure of the strategy is sound; the results are not yet proven.

I don't believe in greenwashing. - Anna Turrell, Chief Sustainability Officer, Decathlon

 

Implications for other retailers

 

The Decathlon case clarifies several points that apply beyond the company. The emissions that matter most sit upstream, largely outside a retailer's direct operations, which makes decarbonisation primarily a supply-chain and design problem rather than a store-operations one; vertical integration, often viewed only as a cost or control advantage, is also a lever over emissions. Circularity contributes to that effort only when it competes with the core business on commercial terms rather than being held separate as a responsibility initiative, which requires a company to accept revenue from selling fewer new goods. The standard a company is now held to has also moved from whether it sets credible targets to whether its everyday product claims can withstand regulatory scrutiny.

Decathlon has committed to absolute, externally validated emissions targets in a business whose growth depends on volume. Its progress will be measured by whether its total emissions, and Scope 3 in particular, continue to fall while its revenue rises. Revenue growth is recorded by the market; emissions reductions are recorded by their effect on the atmosphere, and the two are tracked separately, so a company can succeed on one while failing on the other. Whether Decathlon can reduce both at once will be a useful indication for other high-volume retailers facing the same constraint.