The Green Cost Of Fashion
The fashion industry is the second-largest polluter in the world today after oil. Don’t be surprised if your favourite fast fashion brands are on the list of top polluters as well. With fashion cycles getting shorter, this issue of grave importance for our society is set to accelerate.
Talking about the issue, Bhavini Parikh, founder, Bunoko Junko notes, “Textile waste is a material deemed unfit for use for its original purpose. To produce 80 billion garments annually we produce 400 billion metres of fabric, 60 billion of the fabric which ends up on the floor.” Globally more than 5% of landfill is just poly-based textile waste. To meet the high demands of the latest fashion trends, many retailers produce or procure cheap and non-durable clothing. This fast-moving fashion trend also leads to perpetuating unfair wages and poor working conditions for the primary producers living in developing countries. Even now, more than 90% of the fashion brands continue to use non-biodegradable fibers and actively participate in the fast fashion movement. This is a scary situation; one may not be aware or which many don’t think about for a variety of reasons.
Popular brands are making a move to relate more to the ever-growing base of the environmentally conscious and socially responsible consumer. With all the buzzwords in a place like ‘minimum wage’, ‘sustainable’, ‘energy efficient', ‘eco-friendly’, ‘organic’, etc. We have seen some major campaigns by big brands in the last few years. Prada claims it is using recycled plastic in its Nylon bag pack, H&M will run on 100% renewable energy by 2040, Zara aims to make 100% of its clothes from sustainable fabrics by 2025, and the list goes on.
While tall claims are being made, there is little information about the ground-level implementation of sustainability claims by the companies in fashion business. Some believe fashion is inherently unsustainable, given a large amount of emission of the greenhouse gases, soil, and water contamination that is integral with the production processes and technologies inherent in the industry. Another way of looking at it is the lack of ground-level reporting, even if companies do what they claim. “Sustainable fashion should be treated as a movement rather than a trademark. It should also be linked with a localised and circular economy. There should be tools incorporated to ensure traceability of work process, workers, and raw materials.” notes Abhishek Pathak, Founder & CEO, Greenwear.
While we are on the right track with respect to the recognition of issues and obligations to initiate serious measures, the mere announcement is not enough. Transparency is the need of the hour, which should not be largely limited to annual reports alone. It will be good for the industry to elaborate with narratives, examples, and success stories. Giving a sneak-peek into how sustainability in fashion really works, Parikh tells Businessworld, “As a first step we collect scrap from manufacturing units we then sanitise and segregate them based on their colour sizes and how well they go in garment we than make fabrics, home furnishing, garments accessories and as a zero-waste policy we utilise remaining scrap to make thank you card and story page and visiting card from this.” These are made by women from villages, underprivileged women, rescue homes, shelter homes, and juvenile centres to help them generate livelihood as a back society with a respectable life.
The pandemic has made people more conscious than ever before about their environment. The consumer is moving towards ‘slow fashion’, or fashion pieces with a longer life cycle. Each person is looking to encourage and embrace sustainable fashion, and it is in the benefit of fast fashion brands to align with the current demands. For example, some estimates reveal one t-shirt takes 2248.53 litres of water to manufacture, and the popular brands have a challenge as well as opportunity at the same time to cut down their carbon footprint, and mere greenwashing will not suffice.
