Get the knowledge: How to make better fashion choices

Resource use 

Making clothes and footwear – whether they are made of natural fibres like cotton, bamboo or wool, or synthetic fabrics, like polyester and nylon – uses significant amounts of resources, including water, chemicals (such as pesticides, dyes and waterproofing agents), and energy. The Sustainable Fashion website provides detailed comparisons of the impacts of different materials.

Footprints for water, carbon and other resources used to make garments and shoes (such as fossil fuels used as feedstocks for synthetic materials and dyes) are generally high. Most resource use happens in the production process and during distribution between factories and retailers around the world. As always, fast fashion is the biggest culprit, with the sheer amount of garments being made contributing to a large footprint. 

Brands are also prone to overproduction across the entire industry. Fast fashion brands will often send unbought clothing to landfill, while some luxury brands incinerate clothing to avoid deep markdowns and keep the image of the brand as a sought after item.

Focusing on brands that have less intensive production cycles, or make products locally, help reduce footprints, and there are a number of made-to-order brands that avoid overproduction by only making clothes that customers have ordered.

Pollution

Statistics on pollution from the fashion supply chain are muddy, with one about fashion being the second biggest polluter recently being questioned. That said, a knock-on effect of outsourcing is a separation between conditions and emissions at suppliers’ factories, and the high street – it is not surprising that it is difficult to collect and verify the data.

Interestingly brands like Nike and H&M (which don’t include carbon footprint data from their suppliers) receive high scores in the Carbon Disclosure Project despite their carbon dioxide emissions increasing year on year. 

Several initiatives, like the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) and the Higg Index,  exist to help brands work with their suppliers to reduce environmental and negative social impacts and improve transparency.

Pollution from discarded clothing and shoes is also a big problem. The UN estimates that 85% of textiles end up in landfills – that is 21bn tonnes every year. Even during the life of products, when they are washed, microfibres are discharged into waterways. When those microfibres come from synthetic fabrics, they add significantly to plastics in the environment, posing a threat to wildlife. Washing at lower temperatures, with liquid detergents, or adding filters to the discharge pipe, reduce impacts.

Recyclability

Recycling of fashion items is tricky, and directly correlates to the fabric used – blended fabrics like polyester-cotton mixes, can be particularly problematic. Polyester, a synthetic material, is the most used fibre in fashion. Companies, like Teijin, have created their own closed-loop recycling systems, which use plastic bottles as the feedstock instead of the petroleum typically used. 

One of the key issues with polyester fabrics is that there are few consumer recycling processes for collected waste. Rather than going for recycling, a lot of post-use garments end up being exported to developing countries where they are landfilled, as they do not have the facilities to handle it.