Clothing & Global Overview

What is fashion? For the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s “inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends”. To many others, it means some of the worst excesses of our rampant, rapacious consumer culture. Pesticides. Toxic chemicals. Air and water pollution. Plastic microfibres. Exploited workers. Child labour. All so that we can buy unfathomably cheap products and throw them away as soon as they go out of style or we get bored, if they don’t fall apart before then.

The fashion industry is one of the world’s largest consumer industries, generating 717 million Euro’s in revenues in 2018 and, according to current estimates, the industry is expected to show an annual growth rate of approximately 10% by 2022. However, to maintain this growth, the fashion industry needs to address current challenges related to human rights abuses (such as child labor and forced labor) and overall working conditions, including workers’ health and safety.

Fast fashion is a business model that promotes rapid production of cheap clothing to meet the most recent fashion trends. First used in the early 1990s to describe Zara’s business model, fast fashion now dominates the industry. Many major retailers like TopShop, Primark, Forever21 and Mammut are able to turn an idea in a designers mind to the high street shelves in a matter of weeks. The rapid rise and success of these brands in bringing cheap, trendy clothes to the masses has lead to a major shift in consumer behavior. The average person in 2014 owned 60% more clothing items compared to the average consumer in 2000 whilst wearing those clothes for only half as long. Americans bought five times the amount of clothes in 2014 as they did in 1980.

The true cost?

The ultimate cost of this unfettered rise in conspicuous consumption is waste, pollution and sweatshops. In order to provide such rapid turnovers of cheap clothing, companies have gone to extreme lengths to minimize cost margins.

The most famous and well documented consequence of this is sweatshops. In the drive to cut costs, companies have outsourced their labour to economically developing countries where it is much cheaper and labour laws are often far more lax. Repeated scandals over labour conditions including a total disregard for basic safety measures, low wages and violence in the workplace alongside the industry’s seeming addiction for child labour has created much conversation but little change. Many of these issues are outlined in painful detail in the documentary The True Cost.

Fast fashion also encourages the production of lower quality clothing. Quality and durability have been pushed aside in favour of cheap clothing that meets the current trend in fashion but will be out of vogue the following season. The biggest problem with this is that it has lead to enormous quantities of clothing ending up in landfills. 10.46 million tonnes of clothing ended up in US landfills in 2014. A testament to the true scale of this problem is that only around 15 – 20% of the clothing that is given to charity shops each year ever makes it to the charity shop shelves. The volume of clothing they receive is just too high.

But what does fast fashion really signify? Is it as catastrophic for people and planet as it sounds? And will the current, dizzyingly swift system of oversupply stimulating endless demand soon come off the rails?

This week at the Conscious Club, we will tackle all the ways the fashion industry unsustainable.

This weeks overview:

Clothing & Fast Fashion
Fast fashion can be defined as cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed.

The business model of fast fashion is based on consumers’ desire for new clothing to wear. In order to fulfill consumer’s demand, fast fashion brands provide affordable prices and a wide range of clothing that reflects the latest trends. This ends up persuading consumers to buy more items which leads to the issue of overconsumption.

Globally, clothes consumption is predicted to rise by 63% by 2030. This means an increase from 62 million metric tons (in 2017) to 102 million metric tons in 2030 - or more than 500 billion T-shirts.

Only for maximizing profit, the prominent brands are promoting fast fashion concept, which is destroying our planet and creating obstacles to produce our items more ethically and sustainably regarding both nature and people.

Clothing & Pollution
The fashion industry is being pointed out as one of the main sources of pollution in the World. Materials, processes, a changing and non-traceable value chain, added to our own consumption behaviour are at the origin of a massive problem.

In the past decades, garments have become a disposable item in our closets: the quality of the clothes we buy has decreased, we have lost the skills and we lack the time to mend damaged garments and brands have convinced us that we need to buy into new trends every season.

According to some statistics, the world’s textile consumption was at 95.6 million tons in 2015.

What’s more, the fashion industry is the second largest polluter water in the world. The global cotton industry uses more pesticides than any other crop in the world. This poisons farmers, water and land.

Fossil fuels are used to make polyester, which is now the most commonly used fiber and that can take hundreds of years to break down. Coal burned to operate those factories pollutes the air, raises GHG causing climate change.  

Clothing & Textiles
From cotton to animal deprived and synthetic fibers, many of the textiles used today, are the cause of many environmental issues, the mistreat of  animals and they are even poisoning us?

Around 80 billion garments are produced worldwide, the equivalent of just over 11 garments a year for every person on the planet. The increased volumes of clothing being made, sold, and thrown away magnifies the human and environmental costs of our clothes at every stage of their life cycle. Even the apparently small, quantities of a hazardous chemical such as NPEs, which are legally allowed in clothing, cumulatively amount to the widespread dispersal of damaging chemicals across the planet.

Clothing & Human Rights
We are increasingly disconnected from the people who make our clothing as 97% of these items are now made overseas. There are roughly 40 million garment workers in the world today; many whom do not share the same rights or protections that many people in the west do. They are some of the lowest paid workers in the world and roughly 85% of all garment workers are women. The human factor of the garment industry is too big to ignore; as we consistently see the exploitation of cheap labor and the violation of worker’s, women’s, and human rights in many developing countries across the world.

Clothing & Energy
If the fashion industry were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, behind China, the USA, the European Union, India and Russia. In fact, the emissions it creates are equivalent to 372 million cars driving for one year, according to the 2017 Pulse of the Fashion Industry Report.

Fiber production, spinning, weaving, dyeing and finishing fabrics, as well as clothing manufacture, all consume high levels of energy. Fuels are used in machinery for ploughing and harvesting, while electricity is the most common power source for factory machinery, cooling and temperature control systems, lighting and office equipment. Oil is used to fuel boilers to generate steam, as well as liquefied petroleum gas, coal and city gas.

What do you do regarding making more sustainable clothing choices? By tagging us with #theconsciouschallenge you can share your ideas!

Want to contribute to our Ecological Footprint Bible? Submit us your scientific articles! Mail us at info@theconsciouschallenge.org

Sources:

https://www.sustainalytics.com/esg-blog/moving-the-fashion-industry-forward-regulations-and-industry-tools/
http://apparelcoalition.org/facility-tools/
http://www.fibre2fashion.com/industry-article/3377/energy-conservation-in-textile-industries-savings?page=1
https://truecostmovie.com/learn-more/human-rights/
https://www.dw.com/en/the-hidden-human-cost-of-fast-fashion/a-46577624
http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/campaigns/toxics/science/eleven-flagship-hazardous-chemicals/
https://www.animalcrueltyexposurefund.org/animals-used-for-clothing/
http://www.eli-africa.org/2018/01/animal-cruelty-in-the-clothing-industry/
https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/animals-used-skins/
https://remake.world/stories/news/there-are-hidden-chemicals-in-our-clothing/
https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/5149653/Perspectives_on_the_Viable_Mobile_Virtual_Community_for_Telemedicine.pdf
http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/clothing-waste-prevention
https://edgexpo.com/fashion-industry-waste-statistics/
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/textile-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878122
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/12/03/making-climate-change-fashionable-the-garment-industry-takes-on-global-warming/#6e8dc6e179e4