How our clothes impact the environment?
People don't think about the fashion industry as having a particularly heavy environmental impact but it is a very heavy hitter. Both in terms of toxic chemical pollution to water, in terms of carbon inputs into climate change, and in terms of water use of depleting water resources.
those are the three major areas of impact and air pollution, which comes mostly from generating the electricity that the industry uses for manufacturing. The reason that we face the issue that we face with the fashion industry is that it is inherently a very highly polluting industry and it is operating in countries nowadays, that don't have regulations and enforcements to curtail those impacts. an inherent dangerous footprint.
The biggest pollution that comes out of this industry is first of all pollution that kills rivers by depleting the oxygen in the rivers so that the fish can't breathe. a notorious industry for causing local fish kills, massive numbers of fish washing up on the shores because they basically suffocated from the pollution that is discharged in, the industry is most notorious for discharging chemicals that persist and wind up in our food supply and a lot of those chemicals come from the finishing agents that the industry uses.
the softeners,shrink resistance, stain resistance, flame retardants etc. All of those chemicals that are applied to our fabrics to give them the feel and the performance that customers want, tend to be the chemicals that then get discharged during manufacture. The biggest country where we see the impact of the fashion industry is China. That's because the industry really moved there, leaving the United States and Europe, and has been there for now about a decade in, in large quantities. China is suffering the load of manufacturing more than half of the world's clothing within its borders, a large burden to bear.
however over the past several years the industry has begun to move, to other Southeast Asian countries as China becomes more stringent about environmental and labour requirements.We are seeing the industry move into less well developed countries such as Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia and a little bit into South America and Central America as well.
The processes that generate the pollution in manufacturing textiles are sort of three fold. Three hot spots of production problems ;
*One is in the scouring and washing of the fabric before to get it ready for dying. The fabric has to be pristine to be ready to accept the color and the other chemicals that come on and there is quite a heavy load of chemicals that go into the washing and scouring of the fabric in advance of dying.
*The next problem of course is the dying itself. There's a lot of notorious dyes that go onto fabric. Some of them are quite inherently toxic both to human health and the environment and they don't all stick to the fabric. A lot of it gets washed off if it all stuck to the fabric that would be a beautiful thing. But in some cases, only 50 percent of those dyes actually stick to the fabric and then the rest of it it's washed out into the environment and then up into our food supply.
*finally as the finishing chemicals that are used for the performance of the fabric after it's been dyed, to make it soft, and to make it wrinkle resistant, stain resistant and the rest. So those are the three hotspots of manufacture that lead to the pollution load. people may not be aware that the distressed blue jeans and denim that they buy that distress is real distress. That's not faux distress, and it comes from a lot of hammering by chemicals and washing that literally wear out the fabric before you buy it in the blue jeans, and there's quite a heavy chemical load that goes into distressing denim as well. So if you want your most environmentally sound blue jeans, buy under stress dark blue blue jeans, they pack less of a punch than those that look worn already.
we find ourselves facing this issue of pollution from apparel manufacturing here in the 21st century, which was an industry with a very heavy footprint in the United States and Western Europe in at the time of the industrial revolution and then subsequently, starting in about the 1970s, the impacts were contailed basically because in the United States of things like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act that made it mandatory for factories to operate in an environmentally responsible manner. Those systems helped clean the air and water that we now appreciate , that is because of the restrictions that have been in place in our countries for decades.
we find this this industry is now operating in countries where there is both a lack of technical capacity and often times a lack of political will, to put basic environmental restrictions in place to help to ameliorate the impact of this industry. The single biggest thing that countries could do that would have the biggest bang for the buck is to require real time monitoring and reporting, public reporting, of the discharges of this industry into the environment, both air and water. this goes to the heart of what transparency can deliver and allows us to capitalize on the fact that the world is so interconnected and so transparent nowadays compared to what we had even 10 years ago, certainly 20 years ago. what we've learned in environmental policymaking around the world is that what gets measured and noticed, gets addressed. rather than trying to gear up with oodles of inspectors and cars to drive the inspectors around the country and spot checks, what we could benefit for, in the biggest way, would be taking advantage of technology and transparency, to deliver information about how these factories are operating.
Ironically China is in the lead on providing transparent information and real time data on industrial factories around the world. China doesn't have a reputation as being an open information country at all. However they went ahead and gave radical transparency a try and it has delivered very impressive results. It is now possible to get information on more than 14,000 factories operating around the country at any moment, including many factories from the textile sector. this has enabled both ordinary citizens and environmental watchdog groups and others to really hold government authorities accountable and hold the factories themselves accountable for problems that they are causing around the country. a model that the rest of the world could really pick up and use , quite quickly, to try to get on top of these problems because before they become super severe within their own borders.
The first is that companies measure how much water and energy that they're using on an ongoing basis as they're producing so that they can track problems as they occur and then reduce things like leaks or over usages or that sort of thing. In terms of their chemical discharges, we're looking to companies to do strategic inventories of the most dangerous chemicals that they use and then reduce, look for opportunities to reduce the load into their wastewater plant before they then go ahead and run that plant to the best way that they can.it's a combination of include improved production processes, cleaner production, and then best practices in wastewater treatment that will deliver that the results that we're looking for. although not hard to do, there is a very low percentage of factories in China and the developing world that are on track to implement that sort of basic set of practices. why they're not do this then?is it because they don't have to and they don't want to? They don't have to because their governments don't have restrictions in place with inspections and enforcement that force their hand.
why don't they want to ? because they have other more important things to do and they're important customers aren't telling them that they want it. So what we hear over and over again from these factories is what the customer wants the customer gets, what the customer wants in this case is cheaper prices, along with on time delivery and adequate quality, what the customer needs to want is all of that along with environmentally responsible behaviour and it really would be that simple then for these factories to then want to do this. So as to increase the business share that they get from those customers. Until multinational corporations make basic environmental responsibility a core requirement of their suppliers we will not see factories undertaking the change that we need to see in order to reduce the impact.
therefore We really need to encourage customers to contact their favorite brands, either through social media or else wise, and tell them that they want to know about the environmental performance of their supply chain, that they want to know where their clothing is being manufactured, how it's being manufactured.until the customers actually contact their favorite brands and tell them what they want, we think that the companies will continue to drag their feet. All we'll see is PR efforts that will fool the innocent.
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