Planet
There are four pillars of sustainability discussed in the unit which are: planet, people, profit, and purpose. The production of clothes continuously consumes resources, more seriously, a large amount of waste of resources has caused pressure to be disposed of. The circular economy aims to reduce waste of production and extend the life of products. According to Muthu (2019, p.1) “It guides us to a more frugal, less fictitious way of living, considering every circumstance within its context and becoming aware of the impact of every action we take.” The circular economy is leading people to change their living habits in a more resource-saving way.
From the 1960s till now, the concept of sustainability has been part of the fashion industry although sometimes seen to be ‘sustainable’. However, to save and reuse resources has always been a lifestyle ( Hethorn and Ulasewicz (Eds.), 2015, p.5). People have become aware of how fashion products consume not only natural resources but also all kinds of resources including labor and materials. Sustainability has always been a topical issue and many fashion brands have shown their ways to be sustainable.
Clean water and sanitation is the 6th among the 17 sustainable development goals. This goal mainly describes although more and more people are getting access to water, until now water, especially sanitized water has still remained a serious problem in some areas and water management should be more aware of. The shortage of water supply has caused great inconvenience to people in some areas. However, the lecture on Monday discussed that producing a T-shirt requires 2700 liters of water which is surprising data. The waste of water in the fashion industry indirectly causes a shortage of water in urban areas since water resources are limited, and more water being used in the fashion industry means less water being given to people in urban areas. Levis is a brand that continues to contribute to sustainable development. Levis is famous for denim-made products, however, the production of denim requires a large amount of water. What Levis did is to innovate new technology to reduce the cost of water when producing denim-made products: they released a collection called Water<Less® . According to Levis (2018) “ Through 2019, 69% of Levi’s bottoms were made Water<Less. But that’s not enough.” Levis kept working to improve the technology in order to reduce the use of water and committed to saving resources. The saved water resources can alleviate the water use problems in many urban areas.
Bibliography
Hethorn, J. and Ulasewicz, C. (Eds.) (2015) Sustainable fashion : what’s next? New York: Bloomsbury.
Levis (2018) HOW WE MAKE JEANS WITH LESS WATER Available at: https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/blog/article/how-we-make-jeans-with-less-water (Accessed: 6th October 2023)
Subramanian Senthilkannan, M. (2019) Circular Economy in Textiles and Apparel: Processing, Manufacturing, and Design. Kidlington: Woodhead.