From wardrobe to waste
The fashion industry accounts for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Globe.com/fast-fashion
‘SUSTAINABILITY” IS ONE OF the biggest buzzwords in the fashion industry. Consumers are inundated with messaging about the good (“circular fashion” and “upcycling”), the bad (“greenwashing and “deadstock”), and the ugly (“ultra-fast fashion”) of the apparel industry. But do consumers really understand what these terms mean, or how they should inform their decisions? It’s worth taking a step back from all the buzzy lingo to ask ourselves: Why should we care so much about how we get, buy, care for, and discard something that we all need — our clothing? While clothing is a basic necessity, an outlet for creative expression, and even a crucial component of culture and identity, it is also a major contributor to the global climate crisis. In order to blunt this impact, we have to understand the problem.
Roughly 10 percent of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to the fashion industry. That’s more than international flights and shipping combined.
Though the industry is already responsible for one-fifth of the 300 million tons of plastic and the 11 million tons of textile waste produced globally each year, the world is producing far more new textiles than ever.
According to a report by the nonprofit Textile Exchange, in 2021 global textile fiber production reached an all-time high of 113 million metric tons. That is quadruple the amount that was produced in 1975. By 2030, the report projected, that number will reach 149 million metric tons.
This is despite the fact that there are enough existing garment textiles on earth to clothe every human on earth for generations, and very little of it is recycled. Not only does that surplus create environmental danger, it represents a missed revenue opportunity. According to the McKinsey & Company report “The State of Fashion 2021,” recycling these materials into new clothing could amount to $100 billion in additional revenues for the industry each year.
So why hasn’t the industry jumped on this approach? Blame fast fashion.
In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in brands such as Shein, Boohoo, Uniqlo, and Zara producing large quantities of inexpensive clothing, made of textiles that are not only of inferior quality but also full of synthetic materials that are toxic to the earth during production, when washed, and when thrown away.
And boy, are they thrown away, driven by a celebrity and influencer culture where trends and styles are ever changing, pushing consumers to jump on the latest fashion craze one season, only to toss it aside the next.
That increased demand is what pushes many clothing manufacturers to try to keep up supply to drive profitability. But in the process, they produce excess dangerous products.
According to a 2018 report by the environmental sustainability consultancy
Quantis, the process of bleaching, dyeing, and finishing clothing textiles during clothing manufacturing is the biggest source of global pollution from the apparel industry.
The industry uses a tremendous amount of fresh water — 79 billion cubic meters per year, according to a World Bank estimate. The United Nations estimates that 80 to 90 percent of that water then returns to the environment untreated, leaving dyes, chemicals, and synthetic materials to break down into microplastics and other contaminants that end up in wastewater.
That breakdown doesn’t end once the clothing is sold — with every laundry wash cycle, more tiny plastic particles end up in wastewater that lands in soil, streams, the ocean, and drinking water, according to a International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources report.
These garments cannot be made without labor, and workers in fast-fashion factories are far more likely to be members of underrepresented groups, underpaid, and underprotected. The majority of these workers are in countries in the Global South, and only 2 percent of apparel factory workers worldwide make a living wage. Most are people of color, and 80 percent are women.
Workers end up in situations like the devastating Rana Plaza disaster of 2013, when a poorly constructed clothing manufacturing building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,000 people and injuring thousands more — mostly low-income earning women.
The fashion industry certainly is not ignoring these realities, particularly as research shows that consumers are increasingly concerned about the impact and causes of climate change. To that end, and spurred into action after the Rana Plaza tragedy, a host of clothing brands have put sustainability and climate justice at the forefront of their mission statements and messaging.
Unfortunately, that has led to another phenomenon: greenwashing. Many brands market themselves as “organic” and “sustainable,” in order to capitalize on consumers’ desire to shop their values, but often fail to live up to their own climateand social justice-focused ideals.
Evidence suggests that such greenwashing — talking sustainability talk while still walking the fast-fashion catwalk — is working economically for apparel producers. According to McKinsey, despite greater awareness of fashion’s dangerous impact on the planet, on average consumers buy 60 percent more than consumers did in 2000, and they keep those garments half as long.
And less than 1 percent of used textiles are recycled when they are discarded. In fact, 85 percent of clothing waste ends up in landfills. In a perverse yet lucrative secondary trade, much of that waste is shipped to the Global South, where a fraction is resold to be worn but most ends up rotting in piles and polluting the air, soil, and water of people on the other side of the world.
In the fashion business, as in other industries, those in power are rarely those closest to the peril. The fashion industry still disproportionately relegates people of color to lower-tiered production and manufacturing positions. Recent research indicates that paying garment manufacturing workers a living wage would not only lift people out of poverty but it would dramatically cut CO2 emissions. That’s because wages are carbon neutral, and the more time-consuming and skill-intensive garments are to produce, the more it shifts the fashion paradigm away from fast fashion and toward more sustainable production and consumption practices.While the struggle to bring sustainability to the fashion industry can seem daunting and the problem intractable, innovators on the grass-roots level have been finding new, workable, and scalable solutions to better protect the planet and remove the disparate burden communities of color face, while still leaving room for the creativity, culture, beauty, and fun that fashion can provide us all.