Can sustainable fashion coexist with the fast-paced nature of the clothing industry?
In the 20th century, global economic processes experienced unprecedented acceleration, and the clothing industry was no exception. However, this rapid growth also led to a surge in environmental pollution caused by the production of clothing. In response to the pressing need for a greener approach, what measures are companies taking to align with sustainable practices?
In the past, purchasing new clothes was a relatively rare occurrence. New garments were often received as gifts for special occasions or acquired at the start of a season, while older items were worn until they were completely worn out. In some cases, clothes were patched up and continued to be used. Additionally, the tradition of passing down clothing from older to younger generations, or even wearing parents’ clothes, was prevalent. Although environmental concerns were not the driving force behind this model, it proved to be ecologically friendly.
However, things have drastically changed. Today, the cost of fast fashion often rivals that of essential commodities like food or transportation. Several factors contribute to this shift: mass production of clothing has created an excess rather than scarcity, cheap labor and materials are utilized, and the concept of “fast fashion” has emerged. Consequently, consumer attitudes towards style have evolved, and the desire to frequently update wardrobes has become more prevalent.
Unfortunately, one of the significant side effects of this fast fashion system is the pollution it generates. The planet is burdened with discarded clothing, rivers suffer from wastewater released by textile factories, and various environmental damages result from production processes. The textile industry alone emits a staggering 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, contributing to approximately 5% of all human-induced emissions. The situation is undeniably disheartening.
The Fast Response Approach
Fast fashion derives its name from the speed at which new designs are created and made available on store shelves. This agility enables companies to adapt swiftly to ever-changing consumer demands. Known as the “fast response model,” this business strategy originated in the United States during the 1980s when the variety of consumer goods expanded, customers became more discerning, and predicting their desires became increasingly challenging.
Let’s consider the implementation of the fast response strategy by Zara on this example:
- Zara’s design team closely monitors global fashion trends, using this information to create approximately 1000 new designs each month.
- The patterns are then sent to various countries for clothing production.
- Batches of finished products are subsequently shipped back to Zara’s headquarters.
- Managers from Zara’s branches worldwide communicate specific model requirements and quantities based on local preferences and trends to the company’s headquarters.
- Finally, batches of clothing are dispatched to approximately 1500 company stores, ensuring that new fashion pieces arrive twice a week, tailored to meet local demands and trends.
Critics often claim that the quality of materials used in fast fashion falls short, but this assertion is not entirely accurate. In recent decades, technological advancements have resulted in the emergence of materials combining natural components like cotton with synthetic ones such as polyester, prolonging the garment’s aesthetic appeal. However, it is important to note that the production and use of such fabrics have a more significant environmental impact compared to traditional materials.
The Historical Development of Fast Fashion
At the start of the 20th century, clothing production primarily took place in homes or small workshops. However, significant shifts occurred during World War I when clothing requirements changed to prioritize comfort, practicality, durability, and affordability. It was not until closer to World War II that standardized clothing production became more prevalent, with the introduction of standard sizing attempted in 1939. In the post-war era, middle-class consumers became increasingly open to purchasing mass-produced garments.
The 1960s witnessed a rebellion by the youth against traditional tailoring practices, leading fashion brands to seek ways to meet the growing demand for affordable clothing that allowed individuals to express their uniqueness. It was during this period that the concept of “fast fashion” emerged, giving birth to the first companies that would later become leaders in the industry. Initially, these companies were small shops, but their influence eventually spread worldwide.
In the 1950s, a young Amancio Ortega, who would later become an industrial magnate and multimillionaire, spent his free time sketching patterns and copying high-fashion designs using inexpensive fabrics. In 1963, he started his sewing business, initially employing family members. However, as demand grew, he organized local women into sewing cooperatives to fulfill orders. In the 1970s, after the fall of the Franco regime, Spain experienced an economic boom, prompting Ortega to open his own store in 1975.
Originally intending to name his company ZORBA, Ortega discovered a nearby bar with the same name. Despite this setback, he decided to use the letter modules he had already purchased and named his brand ZARA. The business quickly expanded, leading to the opening of the first international store and the need to seek additional labor in Morocco. With most clothing being sewn at home, production was easily scalable.
In the early 1990s, Zara opened a store in New York, and it was during this period that the term “fast fashion” was first used to describe Zara’s business strategy. While Amancio Ortega is often credited as the founder of fast fashion, it is challenging to attribute its origin to a single individual or company, as multiple contributors played a role. For instance, H&M, which opened as Hennes in Sweden in 1947, is technically the longest-standing among such retailers.
What set Zara apart from its predecessors was its ability to release new designs not just once per season but much more frequently and in limited quantities. In the 1990s, the benchmark for fast fashion was to bring a designer’s idea to store shelves within 15 days. Consequently, Zara avoided having to heavily discount collections at the end of the season. Furthermore, the uniqueness and limited availability of their showcased models created a sense of urgency, encouraging people to purchase them before they sold out.
Today, the retail company Inditex, owned by Amancio Ortega, operates at least eight popular brands, including Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, and Stradivarius. Inditex stores can be found worldwide, with its contractors located in twelve countries as of 2019. In 2017 alone, Inditex introduced approximately 50,000 new models and produced hundreds of millions of clothing pieces each year. To achieve this volume, the company often copies designs developed by high-end brands. In 2016, Inditex’s net sales volume amounted to 23 billion euros.
Environmental and Social Impacts of Fast Fashion
Between 2000 and 2014, textile sales volumes experienced a significant increase of 60%. However, the average lifespan of garments has decreased, leading to a rise in clothing ending up in landfills. This results in a staggering amount of textile waste, with up to 92 million tons per year either burned or dumped. Given that polyester constitutes 51% of textile production, a large portion of discarded clothing can take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s worth noting that clothing doesn’t solely end up in the trash due to end-users; occasionally, brands produce more units of a particular model than they can sell, leading to disposal or landfilling of unsold items. Burberry, for example, destroyed clothing, perfumes, and accessories worth over $100 million from 2013 to 2018 as part of their strategy to prevent discounted sales that could impact consumer behavior.
The production process itself contributes to pollution. Firstly, the use of cheap dyes in textile manufacturing pollutes water sources and negatively impacts the environment. Synthetic dyes entering water bodies and soil can disrupt plant photosynthesis, impede growth, and pose mutagenic and carcinogenic risks as they accumulate in the food chain. Despite efforts by organizations like Greenpeace to promote the use of dyes free from hazardous chemicals, progress has been only partially successful.
Secondly, our clothing has a significant “carbon footprint” throughout its lifecycle. This footprint increases at every stage, from raw material cultivation (for natural fabrics) or synthesis from petroleum byproducts (for synthetic fabrics), to fabric production and transportation. Estimates vary, but textile industry activities accounted for 5% to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018.
Even after purchasing and wearing clothing, we continue to contribute to environmental pollution. Washing acrylic and polyester garments releases microscopic particles called microplastics, which cannot be filtered out by wastewater treatment plants. Approximately 35% of microplastics found in oceans result from clothes washing. Analysis by WWF suggests that a person may consume as much plastic in a week, along with beverages, as is needed to manufacture a credit card.
Apart from the environmental harm, there is another significant concern: the poor working conditions in garment production. Fast fashion heavily relies on cheap labor, often found in “developing” countries with less stringent environmental regulations. However, “sweatshops” also exist in the West. A recent scandal involving underground Boohoo factories in the UK highlighted this issue. Workers in the garment industry typically earn meager monthly wages, with seamstresses in Ethiopia earning an average of $26 in 2019. Women are predominantly engaged in sewing, and they endure terrible working conditions, often working long hours without breaks or vacations. Fear of dismissal prevents workers from asserting their rights. Inadequate monitoring of occupational safety conditions leads to accidents and disasters, such as the tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where productions for 29 major brands were located. The incident claimed the lives of 1,134 mostly young female seamstresses. Child labor is also prevalent in the garment industry.
Sustainable Fashion
Fashion is being asked to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly. However, the term “sustainable fashion” can mean different things to different people. For big companies, it often means making changes to help the environment, like using eco-friendly technologies. But some designers and activists think sustainable fashion should be about “slow fashion.” That means making fewer clothes of better quality that people can use for a long time. Some even suggest making clothes by hand, like small-scale farming. Slow fashion supporters believe that making more and more clothes will harm the environment, as recycling can’t keep up. To make less, companies might need to stop working with factories in poorer countries and start paying fair wages to workers closer to home.
But getting companies to agree on making fewer clothes is a challenge. They need to find new ways to make money. Right now, some of the solutions they’re trying don’t seem to be enough, and they haven’t shared their plans for using eco-friendly technologies with the public. In 2019, when there was a big protest for the environment in the United States, the CEO of H&M said that asking people to buy less could hurt the fashion industry. However, there are signs that things might be changing, as H&M appointed someone who cares about the environment as their CEO in 2020.
Which Way to take
There are already some methods in place to make clothing production more eco-friendly, like using water purification techniques. Another idea is to capture and store the carbon dioxide emitted during production. However, it would be even better to first focus on reducing the amount of new clothing being made and developing better recycling technologies for old clothing. Currently, companies are giving more importance to recycling efforts and there are proposals to transform the entire industry.
Recycling “old” clothing
Establishing an effective clothing recycling system is a crucial step towards achieving sustainable fashion, assuming people follow waste separation rules. H&M, among other companies, is actively promoting clothing recycling through a “closed-loop” strategy. This approach involves turning old clothing into new garments in a continuous cycle. Cotton garments are shredded, and the resulting material is transformed into new threads, which are then woven into fabric for making new clothes. However, there are challenges with this process. Firstly, recycled fabrics made from cotton fibers tend to be of lower quality due to the weakening of the fibers during wear. As a result, achieving an infinite recycling cycle is not possible, and the materials will eventually be discarded after their second use. Another issue is that many fabrics are made from blends of different materials. For instance, cotton-polyester blends are more durable than pure cotton. However, recycling such mixed materials is currently quite difficult. Simply grinding and reusing them is not feasible; the cotton needs to be separated from the synthetic additives first. Chemistry can assist in this separation process by washing out the polyester and other synthetic materials with a solvent. The usable components are then extracted from the solution, while the remaining cotton fibers undergo chemical restructuring to become more durable fibers (such as NuCycl or Infinna) than regular cotton. However, dealing with different chemical materials requires using specific solvents that match the fabric composition, and identifying the fabric’s composition is necessary for applying the appropriate solvent. Unfortunately, manual sorting is expensive and inefficient. Previous attempts to use labels with machine-readable fabric compositions have often failed since labels are often removed after purchase. Researchers now propose embedding corresponding RFID codes in threads to replace labels and enable machine-readable fabric composition information in clothing.
A significant challenge for scientists and managers is scaling up factories for processing fabrics made of mixed materials. Currently, test productions process a volume of material per year that is insufficient to reach a break-even point.
According to a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, only about 2% of materials used in the clothing industry come from recycling (not all from clothing), while over 97% are new materials such as virgin cotton, wool, and synthetic fibers. Of these, 10% are lost during clothing production as cut-offs, 2% are sent to landfills or incinerated as unsold models, and an additional 2% are rejected and wasted during acceptance and sorting of finished products. During clothing use, fibers wear out, and some material ends up in the ocean as microplastics. Up to 73% of materials entering the industry are lost after clothing use, with most being sent to landfills or incinerated. Only 12% of fibers from worn clothing are currently recycled. However, a significant portion of these fibers are no longer suitable for producing fabrics for making new clothing, so they are used in other products like mattress stuffing, wiping cloths, insulation materials, and less demanding applications. Consequently, only a very small fraction, up to a maximum of two percent, of materials are returned to the clothing industry.
In summary, recycling technologies are already known to some extent, but it will take time to scale them up and ensure that fabrics made from recycled materials can compete financially with new ones. Additionally, recycling technology effectively addresses pollution but does not fully eliminate the carbon footprint, only reducing it.
II. Second-hand System
Some view second-hand stores as a solution to the clothing waste problem, and the second-hand clothing market generates tens of millions of dollars in annual turnover. It’s positive that clothing gets a chance for a new life. However, the situation is more complex than it seems. The fast fashion business model has extended its reach to the secondary market. People increasingly buy used clothing but do so frequently, leading to the disposal of unwanted items or their return to the second-hand market. Consequently, the final links in the second-hand chain often end up in landfills in developing countries. So, while someone in Europe may feel good about donating clothes for reuse, those garments may end up discarded in a ditch in Ghana or Haiti.
There is hope for change, though. During the quarantine, online platforms for selling second-hand clothing, like thredUP, Depop, Vestiaire Collective, and others, gained popularity. Major retailers are starting to collaborate with these platforms, and even H&M, the Swedish retailer, has launched its own platform called Sellpy. Companies aim to give clothing a new lease on life by repairing it when possible. And if repair isn’t feasible, they will send the garments for recycling.
However, even in this context, things are not straightforward. The second-hand market drives down the price threshold for clothing, compelling companies to sell new items at lower prices. Additionally, unsold collections often find their way to second-hand stores, where environmentally conscious individuals are more likely to purchase them, as it eases their conscience.
III. Clothing Rental
With the increasingly dynamic nature of life, the concept of renting instead of owning has gained popularity in the Western world. This strategy proves beneficial, especially when it comes to items like furniture. Moving from one city to another becomes more manageable when you can simply rent furniture instead of constantly transporting it.
Clothing is no exception to this trend, as large retail companies’ managers are now offering clothing rental services. While renting clothes may initially seem unconventional, it naturally fits into the capitalist reality, alongside the second-hand market. Monthly clothing rental services already exist in the West, allowing individuals to subscribe to a certain number of items each month. For instance, Nuuly, owned by Urban Outfitters, offers a monthly subscription for $88, granting customers the choice of any six items from their brands. To assist customers in their selection, stylists have created a special seasonal “lookbook” that showcases possible clothing combinations from the available items. The subscription can be extended for the same items or modified for different ones in the following month. At the end of the rental period, the items are returned, cleaned, and repaired.
If this approach, coupled with the integration of second-hand platforms by brands, gains enough popularity, it could potentially lead to a shift in the roles of workers. Some individuals who currently produce new clothing may transition to repairing and cleaning old garments, aligning with the evolving demands of the market.
To sum up
It is important to acknowledge that the individual choices we make, such as purchasing inexpensive clothing, opting for second-hand options, or investing in tailor-made garments, may have limited impact in the grand scheme of things. The larger influence lies in the trends of consumer demand and the willingness of retailers to embrace transformative changes that may not yield immediate profits. Ultimately, the path towards a more sustainable fashion industry relies on collective efforts and systemic shifts within the market.
