Green is the new black, if efforts to acknowledge the environmental harm caused by the fashion industry are to be believed.
highlighted the damage done by our efforts to look absolutely fabulous, and they make for grim reading. The clothes industry uses a huge amount of resources to create its wares, it says, including 93 billion cubic metres of water per year for growing cotton and the like.
It also creates a vast amount of pollution, from the hazardous chemicals used during processing and dyeing, to the plastic microfibres that enter the oceans when we wash our clothes, to 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or equivalent per year from producing fibres and turning them into clothes.
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The source of some of the numbers in the report isn’t clear, but even if some are overestimates, the big picture is still horrifying.
“[It’s] an industry that is incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment,” said fashion designer Stella McCartney at the report’s launch. But while we should praise industry leaders like her for acknowledging fashion’s problems, the industry as a whole is still moving in the wrong direction.
Smart clothes
In rich countries people often wear the clothes they buy only a few times before discarding them, and those in developing countries are starting to follow suit as they grow wealthier. Efforts to develop “smart clothes” could lead to even more waste and pollution. What’s to be done?
The report recommends phasing out the most hazardous chemicals used in making textiles, encouraging people to wear clothes more before discarding them or to rent clothes, recycling clothes more and using renewable materials to make fibres.
But even some of these seemingly sensible suggestions are problematic. Take the idea of deriving synthetic fibres from “renewable” wood or bamboo rather than fossil fuels. Some fibres such as rayon, viscose and modal are already made from wood pulp, which .
It is easy to say that only wood from “sustainably managed” forests should be used, but much harder to achieve. A big push for “renewable” materials could do more harm than good, just as the drive for bioenergy is backfiring in many cases.
The report also calls for a move to “regenerative agriculture” including organic. Organic cotton is trendy , but using it .
Organic farming
For instance, the report claims no “toxic substances” are used in organic cotton farming, but actually there is that varies from country to country, and many of these can be harmful. Worse, organic yields are , meaning far more land is required – land that might otherwise be left wild.
It is good that it has become fashionable to care about issues like climate change. The trouble is that our good intentions are all-too-often hijacked by the rapacious fashion industry. Companies find a flimsy excuse to slap a “sustainable” label on their clothes, and try to sell us even more of them.
Fashion has come to be all about buying and selling, says Kate Fletcher, who studies sustainability at the London College of Fashion. That’s not just a problem for the environment, she says. “Having more stuff does not make people happy beyond a certain level.”
Tinkering around the edges by recycling more old clothes, say, isn’t a fundamental solution. Instead, we need to buy fewer clothes.
In other words, we need to make fashion unfashionable. Or at least, less fashionable.
