Planet

The fashion industry has always had a significant impact on the planet’s natural resources, but it’s only within the last century that fashion houses and consumers alike started to question how we as a people must strive for sustainability within fashion for the better of our planet. As it stands, the fashion industry generates $2.5 trillion USD annually (McKinsey, 2022), and is responsible for approximately 20% of global water waste and 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions (UNFCCC, 2018). However, if nothing were to change by the year 2050, it’s estimated that fashion will use three times as many natural resources as in the year 2000 (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). According to the United Nations’ 2018 IPCC report, there only remains seven years until the damage done to Earth will officially be irreversible, so the pressure is very much on to find new, better ways to produce clothing in a sustainable way.

A circular economy is defined as a regenerative system, where items of clothing are used for as long as they are needed or useful, after which they are returned safely to the biosphere. This strategy of waste reduction essentially extends the life cycle of products and the resources used to create them, and is much more sustainable than the typical linear approach, which follows the more straightforward (and much more wasteful) guidelines of ‘Make, Use and Dispose’. The three main principles of circularity are to:

1. Keep products and materials in use.

2. Use renewable and safe materials for the environment.

3. Find solutions based on upcycling and recycling.

(Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017)

Sustainability in relation to fashion is essentially a blanket term for garments that are both produced and consumed in a way that can be sustained, while protecting the planet as well as the people involved in the production process (Vogue, 2022).

The UN’s 2018 IPCC report states that ‘The climate crisis is unequivocally caused by human activities’, and there seems to be no limit to the amount of evidence that the fashion industry is an especially heavy contributor to the detriment of Earth’s environment.

In 2015 the United Nations Summit introduced seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in its 2030 Agenda, which have since been adopted in 193 member states. These goals collectively have the objective of ending poverty, protecting the Earth’s environment and climate, and ensuring that people around the world can enjoy peace and prosperity. The 12th SDG is titled ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’, and focuses primarily on how many resources are wasted unnecessarily yearly, and how this can be significantly reduced for the better of our planet. This of course ties in with the fashion industry; for example, one t-shirt reportedly uses 2720 litres of water to produce (UNESCO-IHE, 2005). To put that into perspective, that’s how much water one human drinks on average in three years. An example of a brand taking this SDG into account is Patagonia’s 2011 ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ campaign, which called on consumers to Reduce by limiting their consumption of products to only what they needed, Repair their Patagonia garments instead of discarding them, Reuse by selling or passing on unneeded or unwanted items, and to Recycle any worn-out Patagonia items instead of sending them to landfills. If we as a people can remodel the fashion industry by following similar strategies to this campaign, the future sustainability of the planet will certainly eventually be ensured.

References:

McKinsey ‘The State of Fashion 2023: Holding onto growth as global clouds gather’ (November 29, 2022) https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/state-of-fashion

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘UN Helps Fashion Industry Shift to Low Carbon’ (September 6, 2018) https://unfccc.int/news/un-helps-fashion-industry-shift-to-low-carbon

Ellen MacArthur Foundation ‘A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future’ (November 28, 2017) https://archive.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/A-New-Textiles-Economy.pdf

United Nations IPCC Report (October 8, 2018) https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/

Vogue ’16 Things Everyone Should Know About Sustainable Fashion’ (April 18, 2022) https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/sustainable-fashion

United Nations ‘The 17 Goals’ https://sdgs.un.org/goals

Patagonia ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and the New York Times’ (November 25, 2011) https://eu.patagonia.com/gb/en/stories/dont-buy-this-jacket-black-friday-and-the-new-york-times/story-18615.html

UNESCO IHE Delft Institute for Water Education ‘The Water Footprint of Cotton Consumption’ (September, 2005) https://waterfootprint.org/resources/Report18.pdf