Today's guest blog comes from Christian Smith. Christian is a master’s student at University College London, studying Environment and Sustainable Development. We connected because he also works in Fashion. To quote Christian "I love the way it feels to put on a well-fitting suit, the feel of a good quality sweater on the skin. But I also love people and the planet we live in. it’s the only one we have and we need to take better care of it. So I decided to write my dissertation on the intersection between fashion and sustainability – are they mutually exclusive or is there a way to combine the two successfully?"
Thoughts from Christian...
The main focus of this series of posts is to take a close look at various environmental issues surrounding fashion. The world is changing very quickly and resources that were abundant before are not anymore. There are 1.3 billion people in China, over 1 billion in India and nearly 300million in Brazil. If all those countries are to have the same standard of life as Europeans and Americans, we will need three planets just like earth to serve that need. We are getting to the point where “business as usual” right now means no business in the future.
A couple of interesting facts:
1. The global fashion and luxury sector was worth around $1.334.1 billion in 2008
2. The UK fashion industry was worth some £37billion to the UK economy in employing nearly a million.
3. Between 2002 and 2006, there was a 33% increase in the amount of clothing bought.
4. The average person goes through about 35kg of textiles a year, most of which is clothing and is thrown away within a year of purchase. In 2005 this resulted in 1.2 million tonnes of clothing going to landfill.
So what’s the problem? Well, clothing is getting cheaper, but climate change, water shortages and oil prices all point the other way. What is happening that makes clothing so cheap? Well, when value retailers sell their clothing cheaply they usually say it’s because of economies of scale; what they are less quick to say is that the fast fashion trend has also led to lower standards both in the quality of materials used and also in the quality of the finish.
Many have heard of the term Fast Fashion yet many may not fully understand what this means and the knock on effects this type of fashion has.
A report by the UK government states that “the culture of "fast fashion" encourages consumers to dispose of clothes which have only been worn a few times in favour of new, cheap garments which themselves will also go out of fashion and be discarded within a matter of months.” (Select Committee on Science and Technology, 2008)
Fast Fashion is a relatively recent development however, as environmental and ethical issues play more of a role in people’s decision making, this part of the fashion industry already finds itself at a crossroads not just because of its social and environmental impacts but also due to its link to a broken economic system which values short term profits over long term planning and does not accept responsibility for solving social and environmental problems it causes.
The fashion industry relies on many factors. Natural resources such as soil and water are just as important as the people who process materials and make the end products. Many items are today made from materials such as, polyester and nylon which are all oil based; as are women’s tights, zips, flip flops, fake fur and sneakers. Environmental conflicts in the fashion industry have always existed. Since the industrial revolution discharges/effluent from factories has flowed into rivers and lakes. At first this did not seem to matter as it was seen as the price to pay for progress. In more recent years the industry had managed to keep the realities of an extremely polluting industry hidden away from the public by relocating production to developing countries. In so doing, companies were able to outsource production and concentrate on the advertising and marketing of their products. Companies have been very reluctant to accept the role that they play in creating difficult working situations and environmental damage. The photo below shows the damage done through the irrigation of cotton.
This part of the industry works on volume – the more we buy, the more they produce the more profit companies. The only aim of is to squeeze margins. Yet with no monitoring and no real programs in place to collect waste, the majority of this clothing ends up in the trash only after a couple of wears. From a psychological point of view, if a t-shirt is only worth 2 pounds ($3.25 USD) – there is no incentive to keep that t-shirt as we tend to give more value to items that we consider expensive. But when you start to consider all the work that has been done to make these items, it just does not add up. For a cotton t-shirt, we need cotton transportation, processing, dyeing, marketing and advertising costs, paying staff at the point of sale as well as rent and utilities. All that from a 2 pound($3.25 USD) t-shirt? I think not. Something or someone is getting a very raw deal – namely the producers and the planet.
The more we make, the more we cause stress to the planet and the more pressure clothing companies put on their factories and therefore on the people who make clothing. The stories we hear about abuses in factories or children working in cotton fields are a direct consequence of our thirst for cheap fashionable clothing. Moving away from this way of business will allow us to recalibrate the way that business is done and encourage a new norm – one where people and planet are taken accounted for in the search of profit.
Firms are slowly coming to terms with factors that have begun to place limits on their growth. These are systemic issues which will the industry will have to contend and these tie in closely to the nature of the firm and its relationship with the ecosystem that supports it. The effect of globalisation when combined with modern technology is to effectively erase boarders. At the start of the outsourcing process, customers were uninterested in where goods came from. For them, the only thing that mattered was that items that they could not afford previously were now accessible. As environmental discourses started to emerge and the true impact of global industries started to come to light, stories of maltreatment and environmental degradation came to the surface and the supply chain factors are no longer a distant murmur.
Thoughts from Christian...
The main focus of this series of posts is to take a close look at various environmental issues surrounding fashion. The world is changing very quickly and resources that were abundant before are not anymore. There are 1.3 billion people in China, over 1 billion in India and nearly 300million in Brazil. If all those countries are to have the same standard of life as Europeans and Americans, we will need three planets just like earth to serve that need. We are getting to the point where “business as usual” right now means no business in the future.
A couple of interesting facts:
1. The global fashion and luxury sector was worth around $1.334.1 billion in 2008
2. The UK fashion industry was worth some £37billion to the UK economy in employing nearly a million.
3. Between 2002 and 2006, there was a 33% increase in the amount of clothing bought.
4. The average person goes through about 35kg of textiles a year, most of which is clothing and is thrown away within a year of purchase. In 2005 this resulted in 1.2 million tonnes of clothing going to landfill.
So what’s the problem? Well, clothing is getting cheaper, but climate change, water shortages and oil prices all point the other way. What is happening that makes clothing so cheap? Well, when value retailers sell their clothing cheaply they usually say it’s because of economies of scale; what they are less quick to say is that the fast fashion trend has also led to lower standards both in the quality of materials used and also in the quality of the finish.
Many have heard of the term Fast Fashion yet many may not fully understand what this means and the knock on effects this type of fashion has.
A report by the UK government states that “the culture of "fast fashion" encourages consumers to dispose of clothes which have only been worn a few times in favour of new, cheap garments which themselves will also go out of fashion and be discarded within a matter of months.” (Select Committee on Science and Technology, 2008)
Fast Fashion is a relatively recent development however, as environmental and ethical issues play more of a role in people’s decision making, this part of the fashion industry already finds itself at a crossroads not just because of its social and environmental impacts but also due to its link to a broken economic system which values short term profits over long term planning and does not accept responsibility for solving social and environmental problems it causes.
The fashion industry relies on many factors. Natural resources such as soil and water are just as important as the people who process materials and make the end products. Many items are today made from materials such as, polyester and nylon which are all oil based; as are women’s tights, zips, flip flops, fake fur and sneakers. Environmental conflicts in the fashion industry have always existed. Since the industrial revolution discharges/effluent from factories has flowed into rivers and lakes. At first this did not seem to matter as it was seen as the price to pay for progress. In more recent years the industry had managed to keep the realities of an extremely polluting industry hidden away from the public by relocating production to developing countries. In so doing, companies were able to outsource production and concentrate on the advertising and marketing of their products. Companies have been very reluctant to accept the role that they play in creating difficult working situations and environmental damage. The photo below shows the damage done through the irrigation of cotton.
This part of the industry works on volume – the more we buy, the more they produce the more profit companies. The only aim of is to squeeze margins. Yet with no monitoring and no real programs in place to collect waste, the majority of this clothing ends up in the trash only after a couple of wears. From a psychological point of view, if a t-shirt is only worth 2 pounds ($3.25 USD) – there is no incentive to keep that t-shirt as we tend to give more value to items that we consider expensive. But when you start to consider all the work that has been done to make these items, it just does not add up. For a cotton t-shirt, we need cotton transportation, processing, dyeing, marketing and advertising costs, paying staff at the point of sale as well as rent and utilities. All that from a 2 pound($3.25 USD) t-shirt? I think not. Something or someone is getting a very raw deal – namely the producers and the planet.
The more we make, the more we cause stress to the planet and the more pressure clothing companies put on their factories and therefore on the people who make clothing. The stories we hear about abuses in factories or children working in cotton fields are a direct consequence of our thirst for cheap fashionable clothing. Moving away from this way of business will allow us to recalibrate the way that business is done and encourage a new norm – one where people and planet are taken accounted for in the search of profit.
Firms are slowly coming to terms with factors that have begun to place limits on their growth. These are systemic issues which will the industry will have to contend and these tie in closely to the nature of the firm and its relationship with the ecosystem that supports it. The effect of globalisation when combined with modern technology is to effectively erase boarders. At the start of the outsourcing process, customers were uninterested in where goods came from. For them, the only thing that mattered was that items that they could not afford previously were now accessible. As environmental discourses started to emerge and the true impact of global industries started to come to light, stories of maltreatment and environmental degradation came to the surface and the supply chain factors are no longer a distant murmur.
1 comment:
Sustainability of the fast fashion requires new awareness of not only the customers but also industrial players. With the sustaining concerns about our living environment and the only planet, all shall be cultivated with modest way of living (and making profits) as the neo-modernity .
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