Fast fashion – we all know that it’s bad to buy lots of clothes, whether they are expensive or not. I know I personally am guilty of buying clothes that I have then only worn a couple of times, or only once for a special occasion. I’m not the only one, as 40% of clothing bought is never used. This is a problem because production of clothing has increased, yet the number of wears of an item of clothing has decreased by 36%, meaning that more items of clothing end up in landfill. Today, I’m going to look at the aspects of clothing manufacturing (and wearing) that make clothes so bad for the environment.
Fashion is responsible for roughly 10% of greenhouse gases, as well as 20% of waste water (water that has been contaminated by human use). The fashion industry uses more energy than aviation and shipping put together, and has complex supply chains. A significant amount of the environmental impact comes from the production process. My favourite example of this is a pair of Levi’s famous 501’s. These jeans produce roughly 33.4kg of carbon across their lifespan, which is about 69 miles in a car. A third of this comes from the fabric and fibre production, 8% from cutting, sewing and finishing, 16% from packaging and transport and the final 40% from customer use. Another study looking at the same example found that you could even add a further 7kg of carbon to this due to the 2% of elastane present in the jeans. This just shows how each area of the production process needs some improvement. Jeans are a particularly big offender, because they’re such a wardrobe staple, and because 1 pair of jeans requires 1kg of cotton, which requires roughly 10 years worth of one person’s drinking water to produce. The best thing to do with jeans is to choose raw denim jeans, as they will be closer to cotton and will not use as much dye or water.
So the fabric that clothing is made from is very important for the environment. 60% of fabric fibres come from fossil fuels, so they will never decay. One that is particularly problematic is polyester which is polymer based and makes up 65% of the clothing we wear. It is convenient, easy to clean, inexpensive, lightweight and extremely durable, making it a great fabric for most clothing types. However, a polyester shirt has double the carbon footprint of a cotton shirt, and polyester fibres take hundreds of years to decompose, with microfibers escaping into the sea. Of course, natural materials are much better than man made fibres, but they often use a lot of water, dye and transport. For example, cotton is a great material, but it still requires a lot of water. So really, we need to choose better materials and make fewer clothes in order to see change.
Clothing trends change so quickly that brands are putting out new products for us to buy every season or even microseason. Our demand for new things has extended so far that we now don’t even have to go into shops to buy clothes. Whilst online shopping can reduce carbon emissions in cases where the consumer would have to travel to a shop, it also increases the availability of new clothes and encourages consumerism. When online shopping, we tend to buy more than we need and then return whatever doesn’t work, but returning clothes can double emissions, and it can be cheaper for companies to burn returned clothes rather than clean them and send them to someone else.
Like most things I talk about on here, we have to be better consumers in order to see change. Fashion follows demand, so if we demand better materials, better working conditions, less pollution etc. then that is what we will get, eventually. In the UK, if we all wore clothes for 9 months longer than we currently do, that could diminish the impacts of each garment by 20-30%. Where we spend our money is important. Recently, ‘biocouture’ has been increasing, which is where waste from materials like wood and fruit are used to make clothes. Many brands have clothes that are made from recycled fibres, and several allow you to recycle your clothes in their shops. So, it’s a start, but to make a change we have to buy more responsibly, and we need to campaign for more restrictions for brands on how they make their clothes.
A quote that really hit me when I did my research this week was that ‘future archaeologists may look at landfills taken over by nature and discover evidence of Zara’ (New York Times). It reinforces the idea that the decisions we make now will be felt for hundreds of years. Next week I’ll be talking about the practical ways to reduce our contribution to fast fashion, but for now, it might be interesting if everyone looked at some of their favourite items in their wardrobes and looked at what they’re made of – just to see how we match up to the statistics.
Waste Makes Waste 