in the last 16 years between 2000 and 2016, people have been buying twice as many clothes as before and they wear it only half as long as before, so really fashion has developed into what we now call a fast fashion. That means it's a throwaway product - that's only used for sometimes a couple of wears and then goes to waste.
It's been a massive success for business model in terms of increasing the speed and volume of clothes produced by lowering the price. So it's tempting people to buy more , easier and without a thought and that's of course leading to a change in how we treat our clothes - huge amounts of clothing, and so the projections are that until 2030, we have more than a hundred million tons of clothing, which is the equivalent of 500 billion T-shirts produced each year. Shopping has become a pastime, people just shop for shopping sake or to have something new and that's of course putting a massive strain on our natural resources that are used for producing all these clothes so it starts with the material. for example for a cotton T-shirt you need more than 2700 litres of water just to produce this T-shirt. Just think about if we have 500 billion T-shirts coming up how much water this is.
if we think about how scarce drinking water is on our planet then yeah, that's really a challenge. For cultivating the crops that are needed for textile production like cotton for example, you need massive amounts of water, there are pesticides used on the fields which pollute our ground and soil, then the fibers are getting into factories with the use of energy usually fossil energy. There's a lot of spinning. Then there are chemicals used for dyeing processing and so those are often toxic and they often get into the waterways of the countries like China and Indonesia, Mexico and India where those clothes are produced which is harming their environment and killing rivers.
on the other hand, it's also super dangerous for the people who live in those communities, close to those rivers and then it goes on, when clothes are produced between 25 and 40 percent of that extra resources are wasted , they never even become garments and when the garments are ready they need to be shipped around the globe and then we buy them and then it's really a pity if we throw them away just after a few wears. About 99% of the clothes produced in the end ending up as waste. Now more than 60% of our clothes are made of synthetic fibers and those are not biodegradable , meaning they end up as waste for centuries.
what's trend today is trash tomorrow and sometimes lingers on our planet for the next couple of hundred years. by now we all know the saying that "you can judge fashions next season by the colors of the river in China." There's a huge amount of chemicals/chemical dyes involved in producing clothes and a lot of them are going directly into our waterways, the textile industry is really responsible for 20% of water pollution worldwide and in China a lot of rivers which are biologically dead, just because they have textile factories sitting next to them.
One of the huge problems of fast fashion is that today more than 60% of our fibres are actually synthetic fibres and those shed a lot of microfibres with each wash. if you have a fleece jacket you wash it it can shed up to a million fibers and all of those fibers go into the ocean. There have been recent studies showing that microfibers show up not only in our seafood and our tap water but now the final proof is that's also in our bodies, and we don't know yet what kind of health risks that entails but it's definitely not pretty and it shows that plastic pollution through the textile industry is really everywhere on this planet.
1% of all collected textiles are actually recycled into new textiles and the biggest amount of those clothing is going into car fillings or household wipes and they are just used for a little bit longer but then eventually also end up in landfills. So that's actually a big myth that recycling is sustainable and it's also used as an excuse to continue producing that much and that fast. some are supercritical at Greenpeace on this so-called sustainability measures because we think it's actually leading to people buying more clothes because they have this good conscious conscience of recycling their clothes. But actually it's not helping.
the mission of "Detox my Fashion Campaign" is to make fashion greener by promoting toxic feed production and working together with big companies on phasing out hazardous chemicals from the production. in the last seven years 80 big companies from various countries committed to the so-called detox commitments meaning they are working on a plan to phase out toxic chemicals from the supply chain until 2020. Looking into all the companies in their supply chain trying to find out who they are because sometimes they didn't know that seven years ago and then really start working with them and improve the chemical management and the water filtering in the production countries.
after a lot of years campaigning and working together with companies, the fast fashion model is still proliferating and there are more and more clothes produced. at Greenpeace the feel that are slowly winning the battles but we are losing the war. the problem is actually bigger than toxic chemicals. only 15% of the textile industry are actually doing the best chemical management or working towards the best practice chemical management that's possible.But still there are so many other problems around unsustainable production of fast fashion that we think we need to address the overall principle of fast fashion overconsumption and also consumerism.
recycling and circular economy is projecting this image of a textile industry where all resources are in an endless cycle of reuse the technical solutions sometimes are not there yet or they are so expensive that they are not scalable to the mass volume that we have right now in the textile industry. Instead of promoting these end of pipe solutions like recycling, we actually think that we need to slow down our production, we need to lower the volume of clothing that is produced, because the fast fashion business model, there is nothing sustainable about it, really churning out clothes and then throwing them away after a few wares.
companies need to start working on their business model and we think fast fashion at this point can never be sustainable. Unfortunately, the trend right now goes into speeding up shopping because with a proliferation of online shopping, shopping never was easier and done just with a click. one of the first things that needs to slow down is consumption - don't do online shopping and/or do it less. just trying to resist all the temptations of modern marketing on social media and online shopping is really the first big step. then finding the right brands which are actually producing better and more durable clothes, which are not marketed to us as the new shiny trend piece but maybe more as something like a companion for years or maybe even your life depending on what it is. For example if you go shopping for second hand then of course you will also limit your choices. Yeah but that can be a good thing in the end. If you find something that's really unique and fitting to yourself and that's cool. That's what we like about fashion. Looking different yeah. there are many possibilities to to find clothing except for buying new. for example clothes swapping parties, or clothes swapping parties you can organize with your friends. You can also share your clothes online, there are even some clothing renters. It's not many, but it's an option, especially for children's clothing we've seen some new services, and then the whole idea of just buy less, choose well, make it last, as Vivienne Westwood says. What we are missing in the Sustainable Development Goals is really to slow down and produce less so there is not a fundamental criticism of this paradigm of growth we are all following, with the textile industry is following.
even though we see a lot of corporations talk about becoming more sustainable , nowhere do they all ever talk about slowing down their production or limiting their production or aiming for less profits.
No comments:
Post a Comment