Young HK residents embrace green living
As younger generations in HK become more open to buying secondhand, hopes rise for less wasteful consumption
COVID-19 has prompted even the swanky-fashion-conscious crowd to change, enhancing their awareness about green consumerism and environmental sustainability.
The glow of some of their most ostentatious possessions — in-vogue leather handbags, crystal-embellished silk dresses and exquisite vintage watches — suddenly seems to have dimmed.
Viewing the future with a sense of financial insecurity, trepidation and uncertainty, people are forced to reassess what is truly essential to them in life. They are stepping back to the basics and appreciating the state of being simple.
And asking themselves some questions: Has our wasteful and unethical consumption exhausted the environment and gotten us into trouble? Should we not watch how much, how often and what we are putting in our shopping bags and practice sustainable shopping to save our resourcedepleting planet?
It is estimated that consumers worldwide now buy 60 percent more clothes compared with 15 years ago and keep them for just a short period of time. More than 90 million metric tons of textile waste is created globally each year, with only 12 percent of the clothing material recycled.
In Hong Kong, the situation is dire, with just 0.4 percent of the discarded clothing recycled, according to Nora Tam Fung-yee, chair professor of environmental science and conservation at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University.
The amount of textile waste collected annually is staggering. In 2014, for instance, the city racked up 110,000 tons of discarded textile waste — equivalent to “1,400 T-shirts destined for the landfills every minute”, she said.
Alan Della Noce, fashion creative director and professor of design at Politecnico di Milano — a leading technical university based in Milan, Italy — said an “abundance of cheap garments created the illusion among consumers that these products could be used only once. The possibility of constantly updating their wardrobes at very low cost has led to an extraordinary increase in consumption”.
People’s obsession with fashion means depleting natural resources, jeopardizing the environment, and eroding animals’ habitats.
Each piece of clothing normally is 50 to 100 percent cotton. Producing 1 kilogram of cotton requires 3 kg of chemicals, consuming 7,000 to 29,000 liters of water. “Put it this way — producing a T-shirt typically would require 2,700 liters of water, which is enough to sustain one person for 20 days in Hong Kong,” Tam said.
Moreover, chemical fertilizers and pesticides are profusely used in cotton cultivation, destroying arable land, she said. People’s voracious demand for fashion is met at the cost of deforestation.
It takes up to 200 years for discarded textile materials to decompose in landfills and the process generates a huge amount of methane — a greenhouse gas that gets a lot of blame for global warming. It is estimated that the world’s textile trade produces some 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
The United Nations warned in a report in 2019 that wasteful consumption is threatening to derail the world’s 2030 sustainable development goals unless there is a “fundamental and urgent change in the relationship between people and nature”.
The heartening news is that such a change is happening, driven by the boom in secondhand products. According to a report by thredUP, a US-based fashion resale platform, the international resale market is growing at a rate 11 times faster than traditional retail and should be worth $84 billion by 2030, doubling the size of the fast-fashion business.
The world’s luxury secondhand resale market in particular has gained traction in recent years, growing four times faster than the primary luxury market and is projected to double in value over the next five years, according to a 2019 report jointly released by Boston Consulting Group and Italian luxury goods and jewelry chain Altagamma.
At one end of a non-descript street in Tsim Sha Tsui — one of Hong Kong’s most vibrant shopping districts — is a secondhand consignment store that has been in business for 11 years. It started as an online platform in 2007, supplying pre-owned designer clothing, before turning into a brick-and-mortar store in 2010 specializing in the resale of luxury handbags.
Proprietor May Lung said her business aims to reduce the environmental impact from fast consumption.
“Since fast fashion brands, like H&M and Zara, caught on, our secondhand designer garments have fallen out of favor with local consumers. So, in 2010, we decided to shift our focus to only pre-owned luxury handbags. We also have firsthand products available,” Lung said. The shop has three tailoring specialists responsible for repairing flawed used bags, giving them a face-lift.
A study published last year by GlobeScan, a Canada-based public opinion research consultancy, showed that about 67 percent and 62 percent of Generation Z (those born from 1997 onward) and millennial (those born from 1981 to 1996) consumers, respectively, felt guilty about their negative impact on the environment, compared with 53 percent and 40 percent among Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1980) and baby boomers (those born from 1946 to 1964) respectively.
Lung said most of her customers are between 20 and 40, accounting for 80 to 85 percent of her clientele.
Carousell, one of Southeast Asia’s most popular secondhand marketplaces, said its research has shown that 93 percent of Hong Kong’s millennials are purchasing secondhand products through apps.
Millennials and Generation Z have played an indispensable role in incentivizing the secondhand market. Unlike the older generations who go for luxury goods to show off their wealth and status, millennials and those of Generation Z prize experiences more than ownership, said John Zhang Zhong, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, or UPenn.
“In the past, when we asked older consumers if they cared about sustainability issues and saving the Earth, they would just say ‘yes’ because it’s hard to oppose the statement. But what makes the younger cohort different is that they’re actually channeling their environmental values into their shopping patterns,” said Barbara Kahn, a UPenn professor who did extensive research on consumer choices.
Kahn said that “used fashion”, labeled as shabby, poor and dirty, has been frowned upon by older consumers, but this is no longer an issue with young and eco-conscious customers, who see “secondhand” as the antithesis of throwaways and fast fashion. Generation Z’s affinity for the secondhand market is also reflected in the “drop culture”, said Della Noce, the design professor from Milan. “They constantly buy from street wear cult brand drops, but they need to resell items to afford new ones …” Hong Kong consumers may have dipped their toes into the sustainability-driven secondhand purchasing experience, but are not perfectly ready to plunge into it.
The city’s Council for Sustainable Development submitted a report on public engagement in promoting sustainable consumption in 2017. Based on the feedback, council chairman Arthur Li Kwok-cheung said: “Hong Kong has yet to develop a solid appreciation of the importance of sustainable consumption of biological resources, as well as ways and means to practice this.”
Hong Kong people still like novelty and newness, said Robert Meeder, a professor of fashion luxury management at the Savannah College of Art and Design Hong Kong.
Hong Kong and other Asian economies are seen as “gold mines” for secondhand products by European countries, he said. “Buyers from Europe buy used and pre-loved luxury items from Asia, reselling them in their countries, where secondhand markets are widely embraced,” Meeder said.
Amid the pandemic, Hong Kong has seen several high-end fashion stores withdraw from the city. French luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton shut down its flagship store at Times Square in Causeway Bay, while Italian fashion brand Valentino closed its largest flagship store at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui. Swiss luxury watchmaker Longines closed outlets at multiple locations in the city, as have the Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Jewelry Group and the SaSa cosmetics chain.
Has COVID-19, which has upended the fashion industry’s entire supply chain and tamed people’s hunger for fashion, offered a good opportunity for Hong Kong to steer its society from being extravagant to thrifty? Meeder’s answer is: “Yes, by default. “People get stuck in their little apartments, reflecting on what’s important in life. This could be the longest period we’re allowed, in our age, to think about life so intensely.”