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Fast Fashion Is the Second Dirtiest Industry in the World
By Glynis Sweeny
“The clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world …
second only to oil,” the recipient of an environmental award told a
stunned Manhattan audience earlier this year. “It’s a really nasty
business … it’s a mess.”
While you’d never hear an oil tycoon malign his bonanza in
such a way, the woman who stood at the podium, Eileen Fisher, is a
clothing industry magnate.
On a warm spring night at a Chelsea Piers ballroom on the Hudson River, Fisher was honored by Riverkeeper for her commitment to environmental causes. She was self-deprecating and even apologetic when speaking about the ecological impact of clothing, including garments tagged with her own name. Fisher’s critique may have seemed hyperbolic, but she was spot-on.
When we think of pollution, we envision coal power plants,
strip-mined mountaintops and raw sewage piped into our waterways. We
don’t often think of the shirts on our backs. But the overall impact the
apparel industry has on our planet is quite grim.
Fashion is a complicated business involving long and varied
supply chains of production, raw material, textile manufacture,
clothing construction, shipping, retail, use and ultimately disposal of
the garment. While Fisher’s assessment that fashion is the second
largest polluter is likely impossible to know, what is certain is that
the fashion carbon footprint is tremendous. Determining that footprint
is an overwhelming challenge due to the immense variety from one garment
to the next. A general assessment must take into account not only
obvious pollutants—the pesticides used in cotton farming, the toxic dyes
used in manufacturing and the great amount of waste discarded clothing
creates—but also the extravagant amount of natural resources used in
extraction, farming, harvesting, processing, manufacturing and shipping.
While cotton, especially organic cotton, might seem like a
smart choice, it can still take more than 5,000 gallons of water to
manufacture just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Synthetic, man-made
fibers, while not as water-intensive, often have issues with
manufacturing pollution and sustainability. And across all textiles, the
manufacturing and dyeing of fabrics is chemically intensive.
Globalization means that your shirt likely traveled halfway
around the world in a container ship fueled by the dirtiest of fossil
fuels. A current trend in fashion retail is creating an extreme demand
for quick and cheap clothes
and it is a huge problem. Your clothes continue to impact the
environment after purchase; washing and final disposal when you’re
finished with your shirt may cause more harm to the planet than you
realize.
Fisher is right, the fashion industry is truly a mess.
A Thirsty, Needy Plant
Cotton is the world’s most commonly used natural fiber and
is in nearly 40 percent of our clothing. It has a clean, wholesome image
long cultivated by the garment industry. But the truth is that it is a
thirsty little plant that drinks up more of its fair share of water. It
is also one of the most chemically dependent crops in the world. While
only 2.4 percent of the world’s cropland is planted with cotton, it
consumes 10 percent of all agricultural chemicals and 25 percent of
insecticides. Some genetically modified varieties, which are resistant
to some insects and tolerant of some herbicides, now make up more than
20 percent of the world’s cotton crop. Cotton is indeed grown all over
the world with China being the largest cotton grower followed by India,
the U.S., Pakistan and Brazil.
Uzbekistan, the world’s sixth leading producer of cotton,
is a prime example of how cotton can severely impact a region’s
environment. In the 1950s, two rivers in Central Asia, the Amu Darya and
and the Syr Darya, were diverted from the Aral sea to provide
irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and nearby Turkmenistan.
Today, water levels in the Aral are less than 10 percent of what they
were 50 years ago. As the Aral dried up, fisheries and the communities
that relied on them failed. Over time, the sea became over-salinated and
laden with fertilizer and pesticides from the nearby fields. Dust from
the dry, exposed lakebed, containing these chemicals and salt saturated
the air, creating a public health crisis and settling onto farm fields,
contaminating the soil. The Aral is rapidly becoming a dry sea
and the loss of the moderating influence that such a large body of
water has on the weather has made the region’s winters much colder and
summers hotter and drier.
While Uzbekistan is an extreme example of how cotton
farming can wreak havoc on the environment, the impact of cotton
agriculture is felt in other regions, including Pakistan’s Indus River,
Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and the Rio Grande in the U.S. and
Mexico.
Organic cotton is a much more sustainable alternative,
but today it is only about one percent of all the cotton grown
worldwide and quite expensive to grow compared to conventional cotton.
It is not without its downsides, however. Organic cotton still needs
large amounts of water and the clothing made from it may still be dyed
with chemicals and shipped globally, meaning that there’s still a big
carbon footprint with cotton garments carrying the “organic” tag.
Clothes to Dye For?
Dyes are creating a chemical Fukushima in Indonesia. The
Citarum River is considered one of the most polluted rivers in the world
due in great part to the hundreds of textile factories lining its
shores. According to Greenpeace, with 68 percent of the industrial
facilities on the Upper Citarum producing textiles, the adverse health
effects to the 5 million people living in the river basin and wildlife
are alarming.
Little care was paid to Indonesia’s water infrastructure
when its textile boom began; proper framework for waste disposal was
largely neglected. Clothing manufacturers dumped their chemicals
into the river, making the Citarum nothing more than a open sewer
containing with lead, mercury, arsenic and a host of other toxins.
Greenpeace tested the discharge from one of these textile plants along
the Citarum and found disturbing amounts of nonylphenol, an endocrine disruptor,
which can be deadly to aquatic life. Greenpeace also found the water to
be high in alkalinity—equivalent to that of lye-based drain openers—and
had apparently not even received the most basic of treatment.
Greenpeace described the discharge as “highly caustic, will burn human
skin coming into direct contact with the stream and will have a severe
impact (most likely fatal) on aquatic life in the immediate vicinity of
the discharge area.”
The menace caused by nonylphenol doesn’t end
at the Citarum River. The chemical remains in our clothes after they
are produced and only comes out after a few washes. For this reason, the
European Union (EU) member states have banned imports of clothing and
textiles containing nonylphenol ethoxylates (it banned nonylphenol for
its own textile manufacturing more than a decade ago.) While not banned
in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified eight safer alternatives to nonylphenol ethoxylates.
Altogether, more than a half trillion gallons of fresh
water are used in the dyeing of textiles each year. The dye wastewater
is discharged, often untreated,
into nearby rivers, where it reaches the sea, eventually spreading
around the globe. China, according to Yale Environment 360, discharges
roughly 40 percent of these chemicals.
New technologies, such as waterless dye technologies have
been developed, but have not yet been deployed at most manufacturing
sites. The textile industry, which has been using copious amounts of
water to dye garments for hundreds of years, may be reluctant to embrace
this change. After all, this new technology is expensive to install and
only works on certain fabrics.
Well-Traveled Attire
While a majority of the world’s apparel conglomerates are
U.S. based, more than 60 percent of world clothing is manufactured in
developing countries. Asia is the major clothing exporter today,
producing more than 32 percent of the world’s supply. China is the
leading world producer and supplier of clothing, providing nearly 13
percent of the world’s exports.
But as production and labor costs rise in China, clothing
companies are moving to countries where manufacturing is cheaper; places
like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines. These countries
might not have the raw materials needed, so they’re often shipped there
from countries like China, the U.S. and India. Once manufactured, the
garments are put in shipping containers and sent by rail, container
ships and eventually rail and trucks to the retailer. There’s no way to
gauge how much fuel is used to ship clothes worldwide, but 22 billion
new clothing items are bought by Americans per year, with only 2 percent
of those clothes being domestically manufactured. In total, some 90
percent of garments are transported by container ship each year.
While we don’t know what percentage of cargo garments
comprise on the world’s 9,000 container ships, we do know that a single
ship can produce as much cancer and asthma-causing pollutants
as 50 million cars in just one year. The low-grade bunker fuel burned
by ships is 1,000 times dirtier than highway diesel used in the trucking
industry. These ships do not consume fuel by the gallon, but by tons
per hour. Pollution by the shipping industry, which has boomed over the
past 20 years, is beginning to affect the health of those living in
coastal and inland regions around the world, yet the emissions of such
ships goes mostly unregulated.
Disposable Dress
In the first world, shopping has become a way of life, a
weekly pastime and for many an addiction. Shopping malls, glossy fashion
magazines, catalogs and Internet ads bombard us with entertaining
opportunities to spend money. Feeding this rampant consumerism is the
“fast fashion” trend, in which clothing is designed to be moved as
quickly as possible from catwalk to store. Only about 10 years old, fast fashion
is leading the way in actual disposable clothing and it is particularly
worrisome because it creates demand for and then constantly churns out
massive amounts of cheap clothes, ultimately accelerating carbon
emissions and global warming.
At $108 for a white organic cotton tank top, Eileen Fisher
is a high-end retailer, out of reach for most consumers. The vast
majority of us shop at the giant fashion retailers, which have the
biggest carbon footprint—and many of them specialize in fast fashion.
Swedish giant H&M
is the current largest clothing retailer in the world at $20.2 billion
in sales (as of January 2015) followed by Zara, another fast fashion
specialist.
The fashion industry by design is constantly changing with
the seasons, but fast fashion can change weekly, summed up by a sign in
H&M, “New stuff is coming in each and every day. So why not do the
same.” It’s not uncommon for shoppers to wear an item once or twice
before throwing it away for next week’s style, aided by the poor quality
of many of the clothes causing them to fall apart after several washes.
Fashion is all about image, so many retailers have recently
made efforts to cultivate a greener image. H&M has a sustainability
effort called H&M Conscious: a “promise to bring you more fashion
choices that are good for people, the planet and your wallet.” But what
of its claims of sustainability? There is some question as to whether
this is real greening or just greenwashing.
As stated In its 2014 sustainability report
H&M’s CEO Karl-Johan Persson said, “In order to remain a successful
business, we need to keep growing and at the same time respect the
planetary boundaries.” The intense consumerism and rate of production
needed to grow these fast fashion retailers does not reflect the fact
that energy is increasingly expensive and resources are limited.
Globalization and the never-ending search for the lowest labor rates
that made those jeans possible has limits as well.
Crude Duds
Made from petrochemicals, polyester and nylon are not
biodegradable, so they are unsustainable by their very nature. While the
manufacturing of both uses great amounts of energy, nylon also emits a
large amount of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, during manufacturing.
The impact of one pound of nitrous oxide on global warming is almost 300 times that of the same amount of carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas.
It’s estimated that it takes about 70 million barrels of
oil just to produce the virgin polyester used in fabrics each year. But
recycled polyester made from discarded plastic polymer products is now
being considered as a greener option, as it takes less than half the
energy to produce and helps keep plastic products, like drinking
bottles, out of landfills. But there are downsides to recycled
polyester. Used plastic bottles must still be cleaned and the labels
mechanically removed before made into polyester fabric. The process is
mostly done by hand and that means these plastic bottles are shipped to
countries with low labor rates, using dirty fossil fuels to send them
there.
Much of what is touted as recycled polyester is actually
greenwashed products. The U.S. still has a very low rate of plastic
recycling, only 6 percent. So clothing manufacturers, eager to tout
their “recycled” clothes, can’t get enough old soda bottles. Because the
demand is so much higher than the supply, some cynical suppliers are buying unused bottles directly from their manufacturers to make polyester clothing which they can label recycled.
Even when they’re being laundered by you, your polyester clothes are harming our waterways. Ecologist Michael Browne examined
sediment along the world’s shorelines and noticed fibers everywhere.
The threads he found were tiny, synthetic and ubiquitous near sewage
outflows. Eighty-five percent of the microfibers found along the
shoreline were human-made material and “matched the types of material,
such as nylon and acrylic, used in clothing.”
Going down the drain from our domestic washing machines
Browne estimates that around 1,900 individual fibers can be washed off a
single garment and find their way into the oceans and on shores
everywhere. These fibers are another pathway for the chemicals in the
fabric to get into the environment.
A Thread of Hope
Some top clothing designers, such as Fisher, Stella McCartney and Ralph Lauren
are on the leading edge toward reforming the fashion industry. Eileen
Fisher’s eponymous company is already using 84 percent organic cotton,
68 percent organic linen and is reducing water use and carbon emissions
and working to make its supply chain sustainable by 2020.
But as Fisher said in her speech at the Riverkeeper Ball,
hers is just one company. And while part of Eileen Fisher’s mission is
to share its insight with other clothing manufacturers, one company’s
overall impact is still rather small. But Fisher said: “Because [the
fashion industry is] the second largest polluter in the world I also
think we can be a huge force for change. I have hope. I know it’s
possible to make clean clothes, to do it a better way.”
But real change in the clothing industry will only come if the big, affordable brands find a way to make and sell sustainable clothing. Until then, consumers can help by changing where they shop and what they buy.
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