The vision for this "new textiles economy" is that clothes will be designed differently, worn longer and rented, resold and reused much more often. “Today’s textile industry is built on an outdated linear, take-make-dispose model, and is hugely wasteful and polluting,” the report said, presenting “a vision of a new system based on circular economy principles that offers benefits to the economy, society and the environment”.
If nothing changes, the authors of the report predict that the fashion industry will consume more than a quarter of the world’s annual carbon budget by 2050.Ī recent inquiry into the sustainability of the fashion industry by the British parliament recommended a 1p tax on each garment as a way to put pressure on companies to stop over-production, but this was rejected last month. The equivalent of one rubbish truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second, while less than one per cent of clothing is recycled into new clothes, according to a groundbreaking 2017 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an environmental advocacy organisation set up by MacArthur, a retired English yachtswoman.Īn estimated €443 billion is wasted every year on clothing that is barely worn. People mourn as they gather in remembrance of those who lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza buildingPhotograph: Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Textiles economy And that’s before we even consider the polluting effects of clothes once we’ve finished wearing them. Then, consider the chemicals sprayed on cotton crops, the electricity (often from dirty sources such as coal and diesel generators) powering the garment factories, the fossil fuel emissions from transportation of clothing across the seas, railway and road networks and by air to high street stores. For example, the production of one cotton T-shirt requires the equivalent of about four years of drinking water for the average person. The enormous amount of water needed to grow cotton is one environmental cost of the industry. They are asking us all to wake up to the environmental and human impacts of the fashion industry – one of the most polluting industries in the world - in the same way as people did when David Attenborough showed the turtle dying from too much plastic in its belly in 2017. Reducing the volume of clothing produced and sold is key Prices are kept artificially low as clothing manufacturers take advantage of minimal wages for workers and poor or ineffective environmental standards in countries in the developing world.īut there are a growing number of environmental campaigners, innovative clothing designers and fashion buyers in Ireland and around the world who want the fashion industry to have its "Blue Planet moment".
The long tradition of Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter collections has been replaced with an almost weekly turn-over of new trends, drawing shoppers into an insatiable addiction to new styles. The scale and speed at which clothing is produced and consumed now has given us the term “fast fashion”. Collectively, the world’s population buys 400 per cent more clothes than we did 20 years ago. Around 100 billion items of clothing are delivered out of garment factories around the world every year.
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