FT NEWS

The environmental alarm call

Sustainability issues in fashion are strongly rising from the beginning of the production process till the end of left-out production and over-consumption. Consumers worldwide keep buying more clothes, the market of fast and cheap fashion keeps growing, and the newly-styled social media updates keep increasing. On average, people annually bought 60% more garments from the year 2014 than they did in the 2000s, and this proportion has only grown higher every year. Today, fashion production makes up 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions including drying up water sources and polluting rivers and streams. How? 85% of all the textiles go to the dump each year. Washing certain fabrics and materials sends thousands of bits of plastic to the ocean. Average fashion companies have been offering 4 to 5 collections per year in the last decade, while some brands have gone to even more to win the race of fast fashion. Brands like Zara offer 24 collections, while H&M does 12 to 16 collections per year. The sad part is that a lot of this clothing ends up in the dump, specifically by brands that are trying to copy these fast-fashion giants. An equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second. Meanwhile, washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibres into the oceans each year – this is the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. Many of those fibres are polyester; producing polyester releases 2 to 3 times more carbon emissions than cotton, and polyester does not break down in the ocean. The 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics – very small pieces of plastic that never biodegrade – in the ocean came from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester. Overall, 31% of the pollution in the ocean has been composed of that, which is an extremely alarming number. It seems like the fashion industry solely is more responsible for emissions than all the international flights and maritime shipping combined.

The industry is already being speculated to become the 2nd largest consumer of water worldwide. 700 gallons of water already goes into producing one shirt which is enough to drink for at least 3 years, or 9 cups daily for one person. 2000 gallons of water is used to produce one pair of jeans – that’s more than 10 years for one person to drink. Fashion causes water pollution problems too as textile dyeing is the world’s second-largest polluter of water. The dyes and chemicals are dumped into ditches, streams, or rivers, and the dyeing process uses enough water to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools each year. The fashion industry is responsible for 20% of all industrial water pollution worldwide. Thankfully, some apparel companies have opened their eyes to this impending disaster and are starting to buck these ongoing trends by joining initiatives to rapidly cut back on textile pollution.

Awakening at last and working on solutions

Over the period of time, major brands have started taking their first steps towards radically changing the way they source, produce, buy, and retain clothes. They’re removing all the plastic microfibres and transforming the new clothing line to make it more long-lasting and exclusively classic. They’re turning the clothes as vintage, promoting wearing them for decades, providing a culture and mindset of longevity. The leftover wastage of fashion goods is also now being considered by respectable brands for recycling by implementing some fabulous ‘nip-tuck-make it new’ ideas, using patchwork, or converting them into funky accessories to conceal their durability.