Fighting fast fashion
Why green is this year's must-wear colour
It’s a warm Tuesday morning as Kim Priest arrives at work to find 10 banana boxes’ worth of clothing donations stacked haphazardly at the door. The retail manager and her team of volunteers at Hastings’ Cranford Hospice store will sort and price these clothes, as well as the other donations they receive – furniture, homeware, shoes, jewellery, linen, art, DVDs, CDs and kids’ toys. The store is grateful for the donations. The charity of locals has helped keep the hospice operational since its inception in 1982 and each sale makes a real difference, helping families who need care and support.
‘‘As a store we love that people think about us when donating their pre-loved treasures,’’ says Priest.
The store receives about 170 banana boxes’ worth of clothes every week. This increases following school and public holidays, with Christmas and New Year being the busiest time.
But Cranford Hospice is aware that the increasing volume of donated clothes reflects an overwhelming global issue. As an organisation, it wants to ensure it does its best to limit the environmental impact that unsellable goods create.
‘‘Unfortunately, we sometimes receive stained clothing, contaminated items, and goods that are beyond repair that we have to take to landfill,’’ says Priest.
‘‘Lower-quality fast fashion clothing and fabrics often come ripped or worn through and are unable to be sold or re-purposed into rags because of their poor condition or fabric type.’’
The store fills its industrial bin each week with goods that cannot be used. Priest says other charity retail shops face the same issue. She and other concerned groups are working closely with the council waste minimisation team to try to mitigate this.
Priest is rightly concerned. Fast fashion is accelerating the impact of the climate crisis and New Zealanders’ shopping habits are contributing. According to Statistics NZ, in the year ending March 2019 Kiwis spent $3.63 billion on clothing and footwear in card transactions alone. That’s about $750 per person, and the figure has been climbing over the past decade.
This increased purchasing is resulting in rising rates of disposal. Every kilogram of clothing sent to landfill creates 3.6kg of CO2 emissions, according to the Bureau of International Recycling. An Auckland Council Waste Assessment from 2017 says textiles are one of the fastest-growing categories of dumped materials and the volume of textile waste sent to Wellington’s Southern Landfill has doubled since 2009. It is estimated that 25 per cent of those clothes were perfectly fine and could have been re-purposed. An audit of Christchurch’s waste says 6397 tonnes of textiles were disposed of in 2018. Waikato University professor and codirector of its Responsible and Sustainable Research Unit, Juliet Roper, says the fast fashion industry is having a vast and unsustainable impact on the planet, environmentally and socially.
‘‘In 2017 it was estimated that the textile industry produces 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year and that the fashion industry produces about 5 per cent of total global emissions. That’s huge.’’ Fast fashion is having negative effects during resource cultivation, production, transport, use and disposal.
This is witnessed in everything from ‘‘health hazards from clothing dyes, water use and transport of vast quantities of clothing usually from Asian countries, around the world. Socially, because of continued low wages and unfavourable working conditions,’’ says Roper.
Multiply this by the increasing rate of consumption and disposal and it’s clear fastfashion is having a massive impact.
While people are generally more awake to the effects of the climate crisis, Roper says a harmful double standard still exists when it comes to wardrobe choices. Kiwis are more aware of the realities of fast fashion, but the pull of low prices and constant newness continue to triumph.
Not everyone can afford a wardrobe of often expensive, sustainable fashion brands and opshopping is the only choice for some. The issue lies in the frequency with which new apparel is produced, purchased and discarded, just to keep up to date with the latest trend.
‘‘If governments were to place restrictions on imports, there would be an outcry from businesses and consumers. Yet at the same time we all express concerns about climate change and pollution.’’
The United Nations estimates that on average one climate crisis occurs every week, often in less-developed and underreported places. Fast fashion is directly linked to these catastrophes, and part of the solution lies in the purchasing power of the individual.
The industry’s global culpability is best evidenced in the devastating shrinking of the Aral Sea. Since the 1960s the body of water sitting between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has been disappearing, as rivers supplying it continue to be diverted to cotton farms.
Cotton, the material used in about 50 per cent of all apparel, is a water-intensive crop. It takes 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton, roughly equating to one t-shirt and a pair of jeans. About 2700 litres of that is needed to produce the t-shirt, which is enough drinking water for one person for nearly 21⁄2 years. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), current cotton production rates and methods are environmentally unsustainable and cannot be maintained.
As a result, the Aral Sea is now 10 per cent the size it once was; fishing villages have become arid deserts, and a single generation of people has been forced to adapt to an entirely new way of living.
Conversely, the human toll of the collapse of the cotton industry would also be immense. Not because there wouldn’t be enough t-shirts to share around, but because the sector employs approximately 250 million people. WWF says 7 per cent of all labour in developing countries comes from cotton production.
Globally, the changing climate affects us all. Not just because water is essential to life, but because it is the planet’s biggest absorber of heat. The ocean absorbs 90 per cent of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by human activity, including the 5 per cent contributed by the fashion industry.
Ocean temperatures are thus the best indicator of the progress of global heating. According to a study published in Advances In Atmospheric
Sciences journal, the past five years have recorded the hottest ocean temperatures in history. Last year was the hottest ever. Warming oceans result in more erratic and extreme weather patterns, affecting crop growth and human life. It’s a vicious cycle.
Despite all the bad, Professor Roper says New Zealand has produced some ‘‘pioneers’’ in the area of sustainable fashion and has a cohort of fashion designers with ‘‘global reputations’’.
One of those is clothing brand Icebreaker, which sees its role as setting an example for others in the industry, says Meredith Dawson Lawry, the company’s global materials and sustainability manager.
‘‘We strive to do what we can to empower and educate people to make the natural choice and we believe that choice is powerful. At the same time we recognise that as a brand we’re not perfect and we can always do more.
‘‘Our purpose is to offer our customers a natural alternative to synthetics and to disrupt the outdoor industry towards sustainable solutions. It’s why we exist. Sustainability isn’t just a feature of our products, it’s in the values and design of our business.’’
Dawson Lawry says sustainability is also at the core of the company’s design principles.
To minimise waste during the production process, Icebreaker’s philosophy is ‘‘everything you need and nothing you don’t’’.
‘‘Right through to packaging, we are committed to sourcing packaging sustainably and are working towards using more recycled packaging wherever we can.’’
That covered everything from cardboard packaging to retail bags to ink.
In 2017 the company got a ‘‘wake-up call’’ after being rated D in the Baptist World Aid Ethical Fashion Report.
‘‘We were heavily penalised for not making the details of our supply chain publicly available. We were absolutely confident in the processes and safeguards we had in place already. But we hadn’t done a good enough job of telling people about them.’’
Later that year the company published its first Transparency Report, which detailed the company’s efforts, resulting in an A+ rating the following year.
‘‘We were one of only a handful of the 114 brands to achieve this,’’ Dawson Lawry says.
It was in light of this information that communications manager Rexine Hawes realised her choices as a consumer did matter, and could have an impact on the climate crisis, and she vowed not to purchase any new clothes in 2020. Buying her year’s supply of underwear at the end of 2019, she will shop exclusively at secondhand stores until 2021.
‘‘I think the only challenge I’ll face is when I need something specific and have to go and find it. But there are five op-shops in Matamata, where I live, so that’s good.
‘‘I don’t buy labels and I’ve never been interested in the latest fashion, so it’s probably not going to be a huge challenge for me. But I understand it’s not easy for everyone else.’’
Her children, for example, won’t be able to participate entirely because they grow out of their clothes quickly. But they still get involved, hunting for second-hand toys when out on a shopping day with mum. Hawes hopes starting the conversation about the negative effects of fast fashion with everyone in her life it will help Kiwis move past the stigma of buying second-hand.
‘‘There is so much to find in op-shops, people just have to be open to it. Take it home and wash it a couple of times and it will smell like all your other clothes. Some things you just have to push past the preconceptions for a better good.’’
While an increasing number of New Zealanders like Hawes are making more sustainable decisions when it comes to their wardrobe, Professor Roper says it’s ‘‘unrealistic’’ to believe slow fashion will be adopted universally while cheaper alternatives exist. Boiled down, dressing sustainably isn’t a convenient option.
For student and fashion fanatic Briana DuffyLane, living on a budget means not much is left over for new clothes. When the opportunity arises, usually in light of an upcoming event, the clothing needs to be low in price for it to be available to her.
‘‘I definitely get in a mindset of needing to go out and buy a new skirt or top for a specific event … I try to avoid wearing the same thing I’ve worn recently.’’
She says the need to find a new item of clothing is created by the taboo that is outfit repeating, further given buoyancy by Instagram grids and the social media expectation of living a varied and colourful life. Duffy-Lane and her flatmates try to combat this by borrowing each other’s clothes, but she estimates she still shops about three times a month.
More often than not she is looking for a particular item, and fast-fashion stores have more options and are in more convenient locations, including online. It suits her lifestyle.
Shopping also serves as a way to catch up with friends: ‘‘When shopping in the city on Queen St or K[arangahape] Road it’s a lot nicer walking from shop to shop with friends instead of by [my]self. It also stops me from impulsively buying things I don’t really need.’’ There is a thrill involved in buying new clothes and she looks forward to wearing them. To change her habits, she would need sustainable clothing to be more affordable and readily available.
‘‘I think since thrift shopping has become more popular it has also become more expensive. More mainstream advertising of sustainable brands would be helpful. I don’t see nearly as much advertising for sustainable brands as I do for fast fashion and as a result I’m more inclined to buy from brands that [I’m exposed to].’’
Duffy-Lane acknowledges she could do more to educate herself, but at this time-poor stage in her life, fast fashion is what works.
New Zealand is the worst in the developed world for producing waste, according to a 2018 survey by Waste Management World. Zero Waste Network executive officer Dorte Wray says consumerism drives the amount of waste New Zealand produces.
‘‘Like many countries we’ve prioritised growth and consumerism. We’ve had the luxury of lots of land and resources, paired with a small population and this has cloaked many wasteful and polluting practices we now see evidence of across Aotearoa and the world.’’
Wray says it’s important Kiwis know where their waste ends up and how much of a global impact it has. She says the New Zealand public has a role to play in ‘‘demanding higher standards’’.
The Government is taking action and a project is under way to increase funding for ‘‘councils, community organisations and businesses for projects to recover and recycle more materials and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill’’, as announced by the Minister of Conservation, Eugenie Sage, late last year.
Included in this plan is an objective to shift New Zealand’s focus to waste minimisation, meaning curbing the problem at its inception. In the fashion world, this means buying less, buying quality and buying second hand: slow-fashion.
With a planet that is built to last, and a human race fighting to, it seems worth the hassle.
‘‘The fashion industry produces about 5 per cent of total global emissions. That’s huge.’’
Professor Juliet Roper Co-director of Waikato University’s Responsible and Sustainable Research Unit