What is Sustainable Fashion?

by Nora Matthews

Sustainable fashion is fashion that’s mindful of its social, environmental and economic factors. It’s fashion developed by companies that pay their workers a living wage, give them safe, healthy working conditions and monitors its environmental impact, taking care to use more sustainable materials and reduce resource use throughout their products’ life cycle.  Sometimes you may see sustainable fashion called “ethical fashion”, “eco-fashion”, “eco clothing” or even “conscious clothing”. These terms are interchangeable though those using “eco” typically have a stronger focus on the environmental issues of fashion, rather than the social factors. Sustainable fashion also relates to our actions as consumers, especially when it comes to our consumption patterns.

The fashion industry is currently anything but sustainable. It’s estimated that the fashion industry as a whole contributes more to climate change than the aeronautical and shipping industries combined. Without significant changes, and consumers switching to sustainable fashion, the industry could account for a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.  It’s not just environmental sustainability that’s lacking in the fashion industry, social sustainability is too. The events of the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh which resulted in the deaths of over 1,100 garment workers, is just one example of the problems within the fashion industry. And, while many players in the fashion industry make huge profits, when bikinis are being sold for $1.75, the economic sustainability of fashion isn’t looking too good either. Surely something has to give?  The fashion industry is just one area where there is huge room for improvement. In recent years, consumers and businesses have shown signs of change and the need for change was emphasized by supply chain issues during the pandemic.  

Many of the issues with fashion stem from the arrival of fast fashion.  Previously, the fashion industry was centered around two main seasons a year. Designers and fashion companies created collections for spring/summer and autumn/winter. Recently, this has changed, and the fashion industry can be seen to have 52 seasons a year as new garments appear in shops on a near-weekly basis.  This is known as fast fashion where trends change rapidly, and prices are often low drive by companies’ desire to keep selling.  While low prices may seem great, the cost of some garments has become unsustainably low. We’re at the point where it’s possible to buy items of clothing for under $10 and when prices that low, it’s simply not possible that the many people involved in making an item of clothing are being paid and treated fairly. In the UK, the chair of the parliamentary environmental audit committee, which investigates the fashion industry said: “we don’t think the true cost is a '$8.80' dress". That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment.”

Harmful, chemicals used in the fashion industry are harmful to the people producing our clothes as well as our ecosystems. Factory workers and those working with raw materials are often the most vulnerable people in the supply chain and the most exposed to these harmful chemicals.  In one instance, a European textile-finishing company used over 466g of chemicals per kilogram of textile. That’s almost the same amount of chemicals as textile!  There’s an interesting post here about some of the chemicals used in denim jeans.

The garments themselves add to the chemical, emissions and water waste connected to the fashion industry.  The rise of fast fashion and the pressure people feel to update their closets means we’re consuming more clothes than ever, and also throwing more away. Between the years 2000 and 2018, the number of new garments produced per year doubled from 50 billion items to over 100 billion. It’s estimated that 92 million tons of waste are created each year, the same as a garbage truck full of clothes arriving at landfills every second.  While donating to thrift stores or dropping clothes at recycling centers can help, they’re not the ideal solution they seem.  In the production of low-cost fast fashion, corners are cut somewhere. One of these corners is in the quality of garments. By the time an item has been worn a few times, it may no longer be of useable quality and therefore not suitable for thrift stores or reselling.  Recycling isn’t a clear-cut solution either as many synthetic materials, such as the plastics used to make jeans stretchy, are almost hard to separate from the other materials making recycling virtually impossible.  The result of this is that donating or recycling excess clothes doesn’t often match up with our good intentions. Fashion has become disposable and that is a major issue when it comes to sustainability.