Can Fashion Ever Be ‘Green?’

In the Atacama Desert, the world’s driest, the rocky plains stretch for miles, scattered with stones and framed by snow-capped mountains. Located in this barren landscape, however, is something unexpected: low rolling hills dotted with color. On closer inspection, they are vast piles of about 39,000 tons of discarded clothing. This desert in Chile is the final resting ground for many of America and Europe’s unwanted clothing. Such items have often made a journey around the world, having been produced in Bangladesh or China to meet the demand for on-trend fashion.

In addition to the Atacama, unwanted clothing is also sent to Ghana for resale or reuse in Accra’s sprawling markets, but at least 40% of what gets sent there ends up in landfills, choking the capital city’s sewage systems or drifting into the ocean.

Estimates suggest at least three out of every five garments produced worldwide end up incinerated or in a landfill. One reason it’s so hard to recycle clothing is that most garments are made from a combination of fabrics and materials including plastic, yarn, metal and dye, which makes it hard to separate and recycle. Less than 1% of the material used to produce clothing ends up getting recycled into new clothing.

“Sustainable fashion” is a term for clothing that has been designed, manufactured, distributed, used or repurposed in ways that reduce the industry’s heavy toll on our climate and environment. “Fast fashion,” or inexpensive clothing that is manufactured quickly by mass-market retailers to keep up with the latest trends, is typically considered unsustainable due to the associated poor labor conditions, its disposable nature, and its considerable carbon footprint. Research has shown that, despite innovation in the fashion world, over the last quarter century there has been little change to the industry’s overall impact on the planet. In the past five years, the production of clothing has doubled, driven by consumer demand for cheap items in new styles.

The International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network has found that up to 40% of environmental claims could be misleading consumers. “The bigger problem with greenwashing is that it misleads us into believing change is happening, when in reality, nothing has changed or the situation has worsened,” reads a public statement from the NGO Greenwash, which seeks to push fashion houses toward better environmental practices.

A few companies are leading the way.

Rent the Runway rents out designer clothes on a monthly or one-off basis and sells pre-loved items, in an effort to make sought-after, on-trend garments available to shoppers at a lower price and with a gentler environmental cost.

“Sustainability is central to how we are positioned from a business model standpoint,” Megan Farrell, head of sustainability at Rent the Runway, told OZY. “This is at odds with the way the industry is rooted in right now, which is in order to grow and make money, you have to sell as many products as possible.” This summer, Rent the Runway has partnered with travel website Kayak to mark what is expected to be one of the busiest wedding seasons in more than a generation, after so many celebrations were postponed during the early years of the pandemic. While hopping on a plane for a wedding isn’t terribly green, the two companies say that customers can save money and carbon by renting rather than buying fancy threads.

Rent the Runway, which was founded in 2009, has supplied rental items that effectively displaced the need for 1.3 million new garments over the past decade, helping to reduce that flow of castoffs to the Atacama Desert. But is renting clothing a trend that can catch on in a bigger way? Will it ever be commonplace — assumed, even — that you’d rent rather than buy a designer outfit?

The Zero Discharge Hazardous Chemicals Roadmap to Zero is a mouthful of a name for this multi-stakeholder organization that aims to reduce the fashion industry’s chemical footprint by replacing harmful toxins with safer ones. Operating along the entire supply chain, the organization is made up of over 170 contributors from across the industry, including brands, suppliers, chemical producers and others. Among their tools to make the fashion industry less environmentally hazardous are guidelines around chemicals and processes that should be phased out, and an online platform that lets companies browse safer chemistry solutions for garment production: the world’s first database of safer chemistry for the whole value chain.

The cotton industry has long been associated with child labor, as young people often harvest and process cotton across the world, from Argentina to China. Better Cotton aims to overhaul the industry by setting higher standards for environmental and social responsibility in cotton production with the help of more than 50 retailers and brands, and nearly 700 suppliers. The initiative started in 2005 and today almost a quarter of the world’s cotton is produced under its standards. Further, about 2.4 million cotton farmers have been trained in sustainable practices that grant them licenses to grow under the Better Cotton name, and they supply this more ethically produced material to buyers across the industry. Read more on OZY.

on The Carlos Watson Show!

Founded in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 — in which a clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,134 people — the nonprofit Fashion Revolution formed with a mission to pressure the industry to put people and environment over profit. This, of course, remains a tall order. But the organization is at the helm of the Good Clothes, Fair Pay campaign, which seeks to shape EU legislation to demand that fashion houses conduct living-wage investigations into the companies that form their supply chains. Fashion Revolution also launched Fashion Revolution Week, which takes place annually around the anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse and provides public education about industry issues and encourages clothing swaps around the world.

In next week’s Sunday Magazine, we’ll get up close and fashionable with one Istanbul-based designer who is pushing the envelope on what it means to be environment-first in her fast-paced industry. Hint: Sometimes being green means fewer sales.

What are your thoughts on the clothing industry’s efforts to mitigate their environmental impact?

Share your thoughts with us at OzyCommunity@Ozy.com.