Which Sectors of the Fashion Industry Are Growing

Whenever a fashion brand makes a delivery to offset its carbon emissions, it needs to explain why it matters. Whenever a journalist like me writes a story most, say, activists protesting London Manner Week, I besides demand to tell you lot why you should care and should keep reading. After all, there are so many other worthy things that need our attention these days. So consider the following harrowing, commonly repeated facts:

Eight to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from the fashion industry, which is more than the aviation and maritime shipping industries combined.
The mode industry produces and sells somewhere between eighty billion and 150 billion garments a year globally.
Nigh iii-fifths of all clothing produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within years of being made.

It'due south clear that the fashion manufacture is a big, stinking mess. Just if you take a moment to ponder these facts, you realize that something is … off. An estimated range of fourscore billion to 150 billion garments a year is ridiculously wide. The two near common estimates for manner's greenhouse gas emissions vary by a billion tons, a huge margin of error. And saying three-fifths of clothing volition exist trashed within "years" is a meaningless argument.

Notwithstanding I pulled all of these statistics and other common facts from reputable sources. McKinsey. The United Nations. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The Earth Bank. International labor unions. Advocacy organizations. And these facts have been cited by publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Non all of these highly respected experts could be incorrect. Could they?

It turns out they could. Because only one out of the dozen or and then most commonly cited facts well-nigh the fashion industry's huge footprint is based on whatsoever sort of science, information collection, or peer-reviewed research. The balance are based on gut feelings, broken links, marketing, and something someone said in 2003.

If we're serious about recruiting the fashion manufacture into the fight to salve our earth from burning, these bad facts practise u.s. all a disservice. They brand fashion activists look silly. They allow brands to moving ridge vaguely at reducing their impact without taking meaningful action. And they stymie the ability to implement meaningful regulation, which needs to be undergirded past solid data.

At that place are unmissable clues everywhere that something is wrong, from poisonous rivers in People's republic of bangladesh and Indonesia to old article of clothing littering the shores of East Africa to microplastics in our drinking water. But as long every bit nosotros have but garbage information, nosotros'll but get garbage action from brands and governments to prepare the trouble.

"Where are the technical papers? Where are the peer-reviewed journals? Where is the serious work?" says Dr. Linda Greer, a former senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and at present a senior global fellow at the Institute of Public and Ecology Affairs, a Chinese ecology NGO. "You couldn't even get a chief'south caste with this, non even close." (Sick burn from someone with a PhD in toxicology.) "And here nosotros are trying to run a whole manufacture's environmental footprint reduction based on this kind of stuff. It's kind of preposterous that people put upward with it."

Greer is intimately familiar with these bad facts and where they come from — she thinks she might inadvertently be responsible for one of the most persistent. Years agone, she looked at sources of water pollution in the only province in Prc that had good government data, the highly industrialized Jiangsu, and found that the textile industry was the second nearly polluting later on the chemical industry in that particular province. "I thought, okay, for my purposes of NRDC trying to get on meridian of polluters in Mainland china, this is fine. I tin can use this." She went on to found the NRDC's Clean past Design programme, which helped increase water and energy efficiency at Chinese cloth factories, partly on the basis of this transparently back-of-the-envelope calculation.

At some point in the next decade, the belief that globally, the fashion industry is the 2nd almost polluting industry later oil took off, much to her horror. (It continued to broadcast even after I debunked it for Racked in 2017.) And meliorate information has never emerged. "Somebody past now should have gone ahead and figured out what's really truthful," she says.

As the co-founder of the now-defunct upstanding e-tailer Zady, Maxine Bédat used to repeat many of these not-facts at sustainable style panels. After Zady shut downward, she founded an arrangement called the New Standard Institute. Her goal is to collect all the best information about the fashion industry in i identify and leverage it to pressure fashion brands to do something near their footprint. But every bit she and NSI research volunteers started to peel away the layers of each statistic, she realized that there was nothing at their cadre.

I asked Bédat in Jan if she had institute whatever mode facts that were true or had a reliable primary source, but she says NSI is non yet set to become on the tape endorsing anything. "I tin can tell you a bunch that are not true," she says. She homes in on the stat that says at that place are 60 1000000 garment workers globally, which the advocacy system Clean Dress cited equally from the International Labor Organization. "Nosotros reached out to ILO, who doesn't have a record of this information. Information technology was too used by BetterWorks, Sustainable Brand Solidarity Center, and IndustriAll. Lxx-five million garment workers globally was also found in a Clean Clothes publication, and they cite Manner United, simply the link doesn't mention that stat."

a polluted river — We know that the garment industry is polluting our rivers, but we do not know how much.

This is what happens in the fashion sustainability space. Ane arrangement puts out a fact, and four other organizations link to it, and so nobody remembers or cares who first fabricated the merits.

The statistic that four per centum of global waste material is from the fashion industry is the well-nigh well-sourced fact I've found, eventually leading back to a written report by the Uk nonprofit Waste material & Resources Activity Program (WRAP) on the waste material associated with wear sold in the Britain, which is based on a peer-reviewed tool whose methodology is laid out in a robust technical analysis. Information technology still may not be true, given that the global waste matter figure is extrapolated from UK figures and then compared to a stat from the UN, which hasn't proved to be very reliable on fashion figures. But at least it's transparent.

WRAP'south transparency is in dissimilarity to the consulting firm McKinsey, which says that between 2000 and 2014, global wear production doubled, and the number of garments purchased each year by the boilerplate consumer increased by effectually 60 percent, to 100 billion garments per year. (The documentary The True Cost says nosotros buy 80 billion garments a year, while the Earth Economic Forum puts information technology at 150 billion.) Where did the figure of 100 billion garments come from? McKinsey would simply say that it analyzed proprietary information provided by market research firms to come up to their conclusions. And yet, in fashion's desert of scientific enquiry, a report with zero footnotes from a company that has reportedly helped Saudi Arabia silence critics and — over objections from the Globe Health Organization — brought an ethos of cost-cut to the arena of global health is what passes for reputable information.

The McKinsey website also used to say that nearly three-fifths of all habiliment produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within "one year" of being made but at some point changed information technology to the vague "within years."

An Ellen MacArthur Foundation report says that twenty percent of global industrial water pollution is from the fashion industry, but EcoTextile News shredded this in its Dec effect defended to myth-busting, tracking the statistic back to a vague exclamation past a 2012 paper that attributed it to the Earth Bank; the depository financial institution denied it was the origin of the fact. Also attributed to the World Bank is the fact that 80 percent of garment workers worldwide are women, simply when I asked, a representative directed me to an commodity that says lxxx percentage of garment workers in Bangladesh are women and then to a conflicting World Bank written report that says it's actually 54 percent. The thought that the average American throws away lxxx pounds of wear comes from a 2014 Environmental Protection Agency report, but that data is also inaccurate: It includes textiles like carpets and mattresses and garment manufactory waste product.

And finally, one statistic you lot'll encounter in almost every story and at every panel: the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the global mode industry. According to the Un, it's 10 per centum of global emissions. But according to a 2018 report by the sustainability consulting house Quantis, it's 8 percent.

"Allow'southward talk for a moment virtually the Quantis report," says Greer. "They refused to provide anybody — me, ClimateWorks Foundation that funded them, or the general public — any of the information that went into their conclusions. If you were to try to publish that in a peer-reviewed journal, you would be rejected in xxx minutes. It should accept died a quick death."

Quantis disputes Greer'due south label, saying that they delivered the data and methodology backside the study to ClimateWorks and the steering commission for the report, though the report is non peer-reviewed. And since the data is proprietary in a projection by Quantis involving brands, industry groups, and the Swiss government to collect lifecycle data, they won't publish the data until 2021.

ClimateWorks said in an emailed statement, "While the results were aligned with the original projection scope and based on life cycle assessment science and methodology, they are not commensurate with the information sources used by ClimateWorks (IEA energy modeling). ClimateWorks has therefore decided not to co-brand 'Measuring Mode' study, just values the piece of work that Quantis has done to produce this written report." For what it'due south worth, IEA's interpretation of the emissions of the cloth and leather industries is many times smaller than the Quantis report'south.

The report was pulled off the Quantis website for a few months, so republished without ClimateWorks' name on it. And it keeps getting cited. By me, past other journalists, past panelists, by everyone. In that location's merely null else to continue.

Even without good information, brands and countries are attempting to lessen the mode industry's impact. Last year, 150 companies joined a pact where they agreed to "science-based" targets around emissions, biodiversity, and unmarried-apply plastics past 2050. It'south the latest in a long line of industry groups, agreements, conferences, promises, and "sustainable" product lines. But companies still don't know what is happening in their supply chains and then have no baseline for what they will cut their emissions from. (According to a report by Greer's organization, Nike is the only brand that regularly asks for emissions data from its factories in Communist china.)

Some of this bad information has even cynically been pressed into service to increase our consumption. "Double sales and retentiveness," crows a marketing company that creates carbon emission calculators for eco brands. "By purchasing a product, visitors fully empathise their positive environmental bear on!"

Brands have too zeroed in on round design, a utopian economy where waste materials would be recycled right back into new clothes. (Right now, we call back that 99 percent of erstwhile clothing is eventually landfilled or burned. Don't ask me to find the primary source for that.) As a issue, Nordic countries — the simply governments that have committed any resources to improving the fashion manufacture — are pouring money into textile R&D. Sure, that will help with waste, only what if it ends up increasing fashion'due south footprint in other areas?

"Where is the information that shows what the difference is in terms of carbon emissions, water utilize, toxic chemical use in a fully circular economy for the way industry?" Greer asks. "I've yet to run into numbers." She'south spent decades at the NRDC working to protect the environment from industrial pollution and knows immediate the kind of robust inquiry literature that has to undergird government rulemaking on corporate pollution. The fake stat about how much global industrial h2o pollution comes from the fashion industry, for example, is non going to cut it. "If they put out a dominion that is based on something as flip-floppy as this 20 percent stat, then information technology'due south non going to survive a court challenge," she says.

It'south clear that before we do anything else — need legislation, invent new textiles, set targets — we need to figure out what research nosotros need, then enquire the government and big brands to fund it.

"We need a landscape assessment of the information and an analysis of the gaps and inconsistencies that'due south crisp," Greer says. "And and then a call for funding the research to fill up those gaps. Then nosotros'd be making progress."

That money needs to come from the government or a consortium of manner brands, because getting good data is expensive. For example, the California nonprofit Fibershed is planning a fiber mapping project where it would get into people's closets, look at all the tags in their article of clothing, weigh the clothing, and and then process the data to yield loftier-quality enquiry on the fiber mix in our closets. Founder Rebecca Burgess estimates that it will price more than than $100,000 just for California.

"All these sociological and quantitative data sets on the labor side would cost as much or more coin," Burgess says. "Nosotros demand funding for people to be on the ground to accept water samples, to get into factories and count how many workers are women. Unless the public is crying for it, who is going to fund that?"

There is some progress. Terminal May, Stella McCartney and Google announced a partnership to test Google's data-processing prowess by quantifying the impact of various types of cotton fiber and viscose, using McCartney's data and more data they promise to collect from researchers and brands. Merely the fearfulness is that the resulting data will just be bachelor for brands to use.

"There's not enough investment in academia, but I can say there'south a lot of money in private enquiry," says Dr. Joanne Brasch, a lecturer at UC Davis on textile sustainability and special projection director at the nonprofit California Product Stewardship Council. She sees her students get snapped up by fashion brands at graduation, substantially privatizing the vast bulk of fashion science.

This might be her terminal year at UC Davis, likewise. Her inquiry funding has stale up, and UC Davis shut down the two undergraduate majors, textiles and clothing and polymer science. Incoming graduate students interested in fashion sustainability will at present take to choose either way blueprint or material technology. Students revolted and signed a resolution confronting the move, just it was no use. Instead of researching what fashion does to our world, they now can simply study how to make more of information technology.

"This stuff isn't rocket science," Bédat says. "The industry just hasn't invested and prioritized this information. And if we don't invest every bit an industry in this procedure, any company can say anything and we tin't say yes or no on whether it's a meaningful procedure."

But despite all this, she thinks the conversation is shifting. "I am hopeful in this twelvemonth and decade that nosotros're moving toward bringing clarity into this space."

This story has been updated with a quote from Quantis.

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