During COP26, fashion committed to accelerating its climate efforts. Now it’s time to deliver.
Understanding what needs to change is easier than figuring out where and how exactly to change it. Some fashion brands have robust sustainability teams capable of making sure their efforts align with science and with where their actual impacts are generated. Many do not, and small brands in particular often struggle to determine how to allocate their efforts and resources. And with a marketplace that increasingly claims to offer solutions and has few safeguards in place to verify those claims — both for consumers, in terms of product labels, and for brands, as they assess their sourcing and manufacturing options — it can be challenging to navigate the best way forward.
With COP26 in the rearview, we consulted a range of experts to get their advice on how fashion can start reducing its emissions now — not 10 years from now. Based on their feedback and other research, we came up with a list of actions that brands can take to reduce their climate impacts in a meaningful way.
Produce less
However ambitious, fashion’s environmental efforts are all for naught, say critics, if the industry doesn’t also address its overproduction problem, which they say is the underlying driver of its mammoth carbon, water and waste footprints. The solution demands overhauling entire business models in order to shift away from relying on product volume for economic growth — which is a long-term project, but it’s one advocates say brands need to start working on immediately.
“No one wants to talk about the elephant in the room, but the reality is we are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by over 50 per cent. A true innovator would step out and say, ‘We are planning to decrease our production quantities,’” says Samata Pattinson, CEO of Red Carpet Green Dress, an initiative that challenges designers to deliver eco-friendly, zero-waste and humanely-made garments. More efficient forecasting models, better fit technology for reducing return rates and adapting business models so that profitability is less product-centric are some of the strategies she says brands can pursue.
“Brands can engage their customers to wear clothes for longer and reinforce it by reducing the number of seasons of clothing per year,” adds Nicole Rycroft, founder of the nonprofit Canopy.
In the meantime, eliminating waste from existing manufacturing processes would go a long way. Rory Hugill, innovation associate at Fashion for Good, says brands can use “cut-make-trim innovation” and digital technologies to improve material efficiency, and engage with defect detection technology, such as Smartex and Wise Eye, to stop the production of faulty garments. Working more closely with suppliers and adopting better buying practices can help to eliminate other existing, and in many cases plentiful, sources of waste in current production orders.
Scale renewable energy in the supply chain
The bulk of fashion’s carbon footprint is generated in the supply chain. To achieve its Scope 3 emissions targets, fashion has to help it get off of coal and other fossil fuels. While brands work out longer-term financial arrangements to fund or co-invest in a supplier’s transition to clean energy — one of the themes that emerged from COP26 as urgent and necessary — they can also offer to pay a premium to suppliers that are already considering such an investment, or commit to longer contracts with them. So far, most suppliers report that while brands say they want to buy from sustainable factories, they are unwilling to pay the costs associated with making it happen. Brands can potentially also incentivise suppliers by teaming up with other brands that use shared suppliers and showing collective interest or investing in cleaner energy.
“They can also help suppliers access financing by assuring banks, investors and other sources of capital that there is market demand for more sustainable technologies/processes that suppliers want to install but cannot finance independently,” says Muhannad Malas, senior climate campaigner at Stand.earth. Additionally, he says they should be engaging with governments to advocate for increased supply of renewables and to roll back any plans for expansion or construction of fossil fuel projects.
Reform raw materials
To reform its materials, fashion needs to cut its overall use of new raw materials. This can be done by prioritising “next generation” fabrics, a growing selection of which is made from waste materials such as used textiles and agricultural waste (and is a distinct category from recycled polyester made from plastic bottles, which critics say is a false solution). That is crucial for reducing any brand's raw material footprint, say experts, because the most sustainable resources are always the ones that are already in use. Even the most sustainably-produced wool or cotton farm will never match the ecological benefit of leaving an ecosystem intact.
For viscose, which has been associated with heavy deforestation, brands can start making the switch to sources of viscose that are made from recycled clothing or food waste, which uses 90 per cent less water, 75 per cent less energy and greener chemistry than forest based viscose, notes Rycroft, and straw-based packaging carries less than half the ecological footprint of packaging made from trees. (Brands should be aiming to reduce their total raw material use by at least 50 per cent by 2030, she adds.) Leather remains its own challenge. Fashion’s growing use of the material poses an “existential climate risk to the world, the Amazon rainforest, and to Indigenous communities,” according to a new report from nonprofits Slow Factory and Stand.earth and global network Model Activist Community.
Another action item is investing in better agriculture. This has important caveats: brands need to invest in organic and regenerative farming as a system, without picking and choosing individual regenerative practices that may be easiest or cheapest to implement; and be willing to pay, both for the increased cost of the fibre itself compared to conventional versions as well as to help farmers with the costs they will incur in making the transition — or in organisations that specialise in working with farmers in doing so.
Pattinson urges caution in how brands approach the transition to sourcing regenerative fibres, saying they need to look holistically at where, and who, it will come from. “You can celebrate regenerative agriculture, which is proven to be a centuries-old powerful way of conservation and rehabilitation, but not without investing in farmers — paying fairly, protecting their rights, protecting their processes and methods,” says Pattinson. “If fashion brands are making the requirement of cotton farmers that cotton is harvested from a polyculture — versus a monoculture — environment, then are they willing to pay for that service?”
Finally, brands need to shift away from synthetics. For fashion to reduce its climate emissions and achieve circularity, it has to eliminate polyester and other fossil fuel-based materials, says Malas. He advises brands to invest in “scaling closed-loop recycling and innovation in truly recyclable, non-fossil fabrics with a minimal carbon footprint”.
Timo Rissanen, associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney and founding member of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion, has said that fashion needs “explicit plans to take all non-biodegradable plastics out of circulation on some relatively short timescale”. To do that, he says fashion needs to phase out all fossil fuel-based materials — focusing first on virgin fibres, but then including recycled fibres as well — within five years, and to eliminate petroleum-based chemicals, including dyes, in the same timeframe.
He recognises that won’t be easy: “The rapid phaseout should not assume that replacement materials will be immediately available. This has implications for aesthetics; certain fabric textures, surface treatments and many colours will not be possible for a time.” It still needs to be done, and he says brands should be investing “urgently, substantially and ongoingly” in R&D for bio-based materials and colours “that are biologically safe within all phases of a lifecycle”.
More priorities
Shipping: Transporting goods around the globe is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, largely overlooked until recently. Fashion companies can use their clout to drive change in the sector. Two manageable steps, experts say, are to either sign onto the Cargo Owners for Zero Emission Vessels (coZEV) coalition's 2040 ambition statement or set a brand-specific commitment to transition to ZEV by 2030. Brands can also publicly advocate against the construction of LNG port infrastructure, adds Malas.
Chemical footprint: Brands can work with Oeko-tex or Bluesign to ensure their chemical use is in line with or working toward green chemistry. For Pattinson, that’s an important step but still only the beginning.
“Brands need non-toxic green chemistry policies which include education and labelling. They need to dedicate time to planning these out as toxic fashion is an immensely important topic. Do the items they produce have the capacity to morph or become toxic in landfill conditions, for example?” she says. “A certification is not going to be enough without a policy for active management of restricted substances in apparel and footwear.”
Communication: Stopping all greenwashing is the first step. Better communication also means an “upskilling” and greater education on sustainability and brands’ supply chains for communicators involved in every level of fashion, from internal operations to PR agencies. There’s room for more positive messaging from fashion, not just in what it says explicitly but in serving as a role model for the culture of sustainability itself.
End-of-life: Whether through regulation or market forces, the future is coming for brands that aren’t planning for how products can be responsibly managed at the end of their lives.
“End-of-life from a brand perspective is increasingly linked to the notion of extended producer responsibility, and the concept that brands are responsible for the items they make beyond the point of sale,” says Pattinson. To prepare, brands should be designing products for circularity from the very beginning — a shift that involves materials and product design, she says, as well as chemicals used. Brands can also invest in R&D for next-gen materials and in “enabling infrastructure to build circular and recycling capacity, especially in regions which have very little of it right now,” adds Rycroft.
No false solutions
A final word of caution from Rycroft: “Don’t trade in one environmental disaster for another.”
All too often, sustainability initiatives come with unintended consequences, which means a brand may shift its impact from one place to another but not actually reduce it. For example, eliminating plastic packaging is not a planetary win if it’s simply replaced with cardboard associated with deforestation, says Rycroft. “Beware false solutions.”
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