Nienke Hoogvliet, SEA ME collection. Products made with seaweed yarn and natural seaweed dyes.
Who Is Responsible?
What are the key challenges facing fashion and its sustainable transformation?
Words by Brooke Roberts-Islam, Techstyler
Sustainability in fashion is an immense and complex subject that can often feel overwhelming. How do we know if recycling is the best way forward? Will one innovative solution cause new problems further down the line? What does circularity even mean? And what new materials offer the best solutions? Luckily, to help decipher some of the confusion, Techstyler has teamed up with Slow Factory’s Study Hall. Following the New York instalment of Study Hall, Techstyler will be putting together a comprehensive round-up of the event to demystify key areas that affect the sustainability efforts being made industry-wide. To set the scene for that report Brooke Roberts-Islam of Techstyler breaks down some of the main issues around the status of fashion’s sustainability situation to help clarify what is really going on.
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When analyzing sustainability initiatives in relation to fashion it is critical to understand the industry context and the mechanics that differentiate between incremental and paradigm-shifting change. It’s also important to get a balanced and holistic assessment of which solutions offer the planet the most environmental gains as quickly as possible and how they will be implemented. At Techstyler, this is our mission. We're a sustainability and fashion tech communications agency; we dig into data and research, interview game-changing entrepreneurs and meet new start-ups offering materials and technology solutions. We also attend global summits in Europe and Asia to balance news of the brand and retailer efforts with the advances of manufacturers and mills. We are the industry yin to Study Hall’s cultural and political yang, complementing its deep connection with the movements shaping the future of the fashion industry.
Through our research, we have identified key areas that we need to understand better in order to make decisions on the innovations and initiatives that will drive our industry towards sustainable transformation sooner, rather than later. Currently, these areas are; materials and chemicals, circularity, and understanding the relative impact that fashion has on the environment. What is currently going on in these areas and what changes do we need to see happen in order to create a more sustainable industry?
“Polyester contributes more to global carbon emissions than global cotton production.”
If we start by looking at the environmental challenges we currently face globally and the role that fashion plays in these it’s helpful to look at the stats. The UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) puts the fashion industry’s contribution to global emissions at around 10%. This is due to the fashion industry’s heavy reliance on oil and gas for petroleum, the basis of synthetic fibers, including polyester. Polyester contributes more to global carbon emissions than global cotton production, it also sheds plastic micro-fibers into wastewater and it is used in around 60% of textiles produced globally (in varying proportions), according to Vox.com. The flipside of this is that cotton production requires vast amounts of water and can damage the fertility of land through chemical fertilizers and over-cropping. So, both have their own problems and are deemed unsustainable in their current form.
If we break this down further, figures suggest that the majority of fashion’s total carbon emissions are generated during the material phase (i.e. the growing/creation of the raw fibers, the manufacturing, and dyeing of yarns and the creation of textiles from these yarns). According to the Pulse of the Fashion Industry report, natural fibers are the most resource-intensive. It stands to reason, then, that a huge sustainability focus for the fashion industry moving forward should be on new textile manufacturing methods; looking for raw material alternatives to petroleum and cotton and developing chemical recycling methods that reduce the dependency on new fiber creation without compromising on quality.
“Given that most textiles in use contain a mixture of natural and synthetic fibers investment in recycling solutions that can process blended textiles is pivotal.”
With the global textile demand rising and the trend of consumers wearing items fewer times before disposing of them in landfill (often attributed to fast fashion), putting those textiles back into the industry via recycling solutions is currently one of the highest industry priorities. Given that most textiles in use contain a mixture of natural and synthetic fibers investment in recycling solutions that can process blended textiles is pivotal. Examples of scalable developments in this area include Infinited Fiber who have already partnered with H&M) and Re:newcell, both are new technologies that allow textile waste to be used again and again.
These recycling efforts are aimed at closing the loop in fashion consumption and redirecting fashion from landfill to either the second-hand clothing market (an area of the industry that is growing more than twice as fast as the ‘fast’ fashion market according to ThredUp) or into fiber-to-fiber recycling. The closure of the loop achieves what is termed circularity, and describes a system where all products are used perpetually so they never end up in landfill.
The success of circularity depends on various factors. The most critical is circular design within the current industry context and using materials available that are produced with safe chemicals throughout the textile and garment manufacturing process. Chemical use is often overlooked in the context of circularity however, it determines whether or not a textile is suitable for recycling and as we need all textiles to be recyclable, we need to eliminate all toxic chemicals.
To this end, the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) partnership compiled a Manufacturing Restricted Substances List (MRSL) that has become an industry standard for safe chemical use. An App called BHive now uses visual recognition of ingredients lists on chemical containers and reconciles it digitally with the MRSL to provide an instant and verifiable confirmation that the chemicals intended to be used are safe. This replaces the old manual system which resulted in many toxic chemicals not being detected until garments were chemically tested after export.
In terms of reducing global carbon emissions related to textile production efforts are being put into sourcing alternative raw materials to cotton and petroleum. An example is the research, development, and scaling of seaweed-based textiles. Seaweed is a plant that naturally regenerates in abundance. It requires no additional water, fertilizers or land to grow and it can perform in the same way as cotton when processed into cellulosic fibers—making its fiber composition virtually identical. At the moment, seaweed is being blended with cotton and other fibers but as the processing of this plant becomes more efficient and the output yarns are fine-tuned, its usage is expected to rise.
Faber Futures’ laboratory grown bacteria used to dye textiles.
In recent years there has also been considerable research and development into bacterially grown cellulose and GM-based lab-grown silk equivalents. By current assessment, these offer future solutions in the next 5-10-year timeframe but it has been difficult to assess their relative resource use for growth versus yield as they are still in development. This makes it difficult to understand the overall magnitude of the impact they could have at reducing textile-related carbon emissions at scale in a way that could replace other materials currently in use. It is worth noting at this point that the only way to truly assess the relative merits of one material or product versus another is by conducting Life Cycle Analysis of the total environmental impact from raw material to end of life. Without this, claims of sustainability may not be able to be substantiated with data.
As we move forward into the next decade with vital decisions to make about where our sustainability efforts and financial resources should be focused, understanding the current status around materials, circularity and total environmental impact is crucial. In addition, harnessing the power of global citizens to demand safer, cleaner products and processes (based on informed knowledge of fashion’s sustainability status and the key challenges) is necessary. This is why events like Study Hall and the conversations they facilitate are so important.