“There is enough clothing currently in existence for us to clothe the world umpteen times over,” Jacobs added. “In this scenario, even the production of a single organic T-shirt looks out of sync.” This is how Emily Dixon ended her article “The problem with ‘sustainable fashion”. How hopeless this may sound, it makes very clear what the problem is all about.
The fashion industry is producing astronomical amounts of clothing each year, in 2019 alone 100 billion items of clothing were produced. Just like we are not able to grasp how much money Bill Gates really owns, is the fast fashion industry making more clothes than our brains can understand. This industry wants us to buy new clothes every single day. They try to make it as easy as possible. It is cheap and gets delivered to your doorstep the very next day. When you press that order button on zalando.com, try to think of the process needed to get that pair of jeans to your house.
To start, the cotton for your jeans is grown in India. When the cotton is harvested it gets shipped to China where it will be spun to threads. In their turn, the threads get woven to fabric so they can get, or already have been, bleached and painted with dozens of chemicals. The fabric gets transported to Bangladesh where it will be sewn as your jeans. Finally, your jeans will be shipped from Bangladesh to Europe’s shops and warehouses.
This altogether makes the fashion industry responsible for a staggering 10% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Unsurprisingly the fashion industry takes second place as the biggest polluter in the whole world next to the oil industry.
You and I can both Imagine this is far from a sustainable process. At the root of this problem lies the “linear growth” where our economy is built upon. We are subtracting valuable recourses from the earth which get manufactured into products to only end up as garbage in our trashcans. Everybody has heard of the solution to the problem of our “linear growth economy”. Chances are, you’ve thought of it already; The Circular Economy, the “only” thing we have to do, is seeing our garbage as usable, valuable recourses again. Just like mother nature has been teaching us since day one.
So you are now buying sustainable jeans. Of course, you want to contribute to a “Circular Economy”, right? This is where things get tricky again. As Mckinsey’s Saskia Hedrich puts it; “Using recycled materials or pledging to become carbon neutral doesn’t necessarily make a brand sustainable”, “Objective criteria for rating sustainable fashion are missing”. There are tons of quality marks to choose from. As a result, you and I are struggling to make legitimately sustainable choices while the term remains so vague. It makes it difficult when it comes to rating which offerings and which brands are truly sustainable.
We are trying to fix this by creating all sorts of certification standards. There are so many quality marks that consumers are more likely to get confused by this abundance, than that we are making fundamental changes to the system.
With growing awareness among consumers about the problem, businesses are eager to make use of this demand for “green”. This is not always done in the most honest way possible. Acting as a very “green” & “sustainable” business and using random quality marks, a principle called greenwashing, attracts a lot of customers who want to do good. Designer Reijina Pyo says, “I think there is a lot of greenwashing out there”, she later adds “The more awareness there is the more we can challenge and interrogate its use”. Emily Dixon describes the problem in a question; “Is fashion truly becoming more sustainable? Or is the concept just another trend?”. CEOs are seeing it as a “must” in doing business to be sustainable. However, it must be seen as a “must” in “doing earth”.
And then there is us, the consumers. We are the demand, and therefore indirectly create the supply. Because it is so easy and cheap to get your hands on new clothes, we won’t hesitate to throw something away after we have only worn it 4 times. Even when we have worn these cheap clothes until they fall apart, it is more expensive to buy new ones than to repair our old ones. Cheap clothing delivers hollow fulfillment for a brief moment in time. Sustainable fashion delivers lasting quality and the promise of positive change. What’s your conscious choice?
Don’t think of the impact the clothes you buy have on your wallet, but think of the impact it has on “our” beloved earth.
Luckily there are plenty of initiatives to improve our current system like the Global Fashion Agenda, and there are lots of pioneers working really hard to think of new solutions. For instance, hemp is superior to cotton in countless ways. To start, hemp fabric feels & looks like top-quality fabric you are familiar with like silk or linen. The fibers that can be made from the hemp plant are a lot stronger than, so clothes made from it are more durable. The manufacturing & growing of hemp uses twenty times less water and a fraction of the harmful chemicals compared to cotton. On top of that hemp can be cultivated almost all around the world. So there is no need to ship recourses, semi-finished and final products all around the globe. The passion and love that these pioneers put into their products and services are breathtaking. I have been in close contact with Batuhan & Onur, hemp socks producers. Batuhan & Onur’s Qubar Socks is a Kickstarter project aiming to deliver the most comfortable and sustainable socks your feet have ever worn.
The possibilities are endless; Leasing a pair of jeans, borrowing clothes from a “clothing library”, textile made from mycelium (a type of mushroom), pinatex a fibre made from pineapples, leather made from washed-up jellyfish. The point is, the solutions are there. We only have to find them. For every single place on earth, there is a solution to the problem.
We need to make radical changes to make the industry more sustainable. Innovating, experimenting, and working on the cultural problem is crucial. Currently, we are focused on economic value and the “world-loving perspective” is lacking.
This is our job for “our” world. Producers need to work on their processes and consumers need to work just as hard on their priorities. So ask yourself the next time you are ordering your dirt-cheap pair of jeans;
Am I contributing to the old or the new fashion industry?
The future is bright thanks to the rising demand for a sustainable fashion industry and passionate pioneers like Batuhan & Onur. The steps we are making right now are not always perfect. But supporting people like Batuhan & Onur encourages the market to improve over time. Producers and consumers are all investing time, effort & money for the same purpose. The road to a circular economy will take years. It is up to you, me, Batuhan & Onur to take these first steps. So take your first step and have a look on Kickstarter at Qubar Socks.
