FASHION – A FORM OF ESCAPISM, OR A FORM OF IMPRISONMENT?
Of all the areas of substantial, rapid growth in profit-from-waste, the global clothing trade (fast fashion in particular) takes the breath away, in terms of speed of growth and reckless waste. Thread by thread, scrap by scrap, the landfills and illegal waste dumps of the world are filling up with an accelerating flood of polyester-driven instafashion, dumped by rich zones of consumption, in the US, China and the EU:
(Source: Changing Markets Foundation, 2023)
Of the major sources of waste, the top 3 in the Apparel Industry Market are the EU (35.2% of all parallel demand – 2019), China (31%), the US (5%) and the amount of apparel consumed has multiplied many times since the 1990s, particularly in China.
Rapid growth in high-turnover fashion is the driver of the process. Global clothing sales growth rose from about 50 billion units in 2000 to 100 billion in 2015; consumption is expected to rise by 63% to 2030 (ECAP, 2018). Just in terms of amounts used, then, the clothing trade is phenomenal. In the UK, national buyer of the most clothes in Europe, each UK citizen now buys an average of five times more clothing than they bought in the 1980s. Just in terms of market growth, waste is phenomenal – so how did we get to here?
THE INSATIABLE BEHEMOTHS DRIVING THE GLOBAL OVER-CONSUMPTION OF CLOTHES
Over-consumption is driven by the fierce need of the MNCs (Multi-National Corporations) to speed up the passage of materials, textiles and clothing through a system that searches the world for ‘the cheapest needle’, the location where clothes on design can be produced for a pittance and transported easily to consumers.
If consumers only bought the clothes they need or could reasonably use, the global trade in clothing and textiles would be many times smaller and growing far more slowly. But over-consumption (“consuming without clear need to satisfy” (Anguelov, 2015)) is a process driven by a steel-cold corporate heart.
Acceleration can’t be driven by consumer need, so new markets and the cynical use of ‘fashion’ are deployed to drive consumption of clothing way, way beyond need.
(Source: Observatory of Economic Complexity)
As we can see from the diagram, global clothing sales have been exceeding the growth of global income quite substantially for some time now, and at the same time clothing use declines… more people are buying more clothes than they can reasonably use and using them less and less. Not only more clothes, but using more and different types of environmentally-destructive materials to produce them:
(Source: Niinimäki et al, 2020)
Retailers of clothing like to pretend that fashion tastes and durability are driven by the consumer, but THE REVERSE IS TRUE! The MNCs aren’t slaves to the fashion demands of consumers – they use fashion as a tool to sell clothes and to speed up the through-put of clothes. It’s the MNC, not the consumer, which decides the depth, breadth and flow-speed of fast fashion.
The retailers use what’s referred to as ‘demand-supply’ behaviour, using their control of clothing supply chains to dictate what they need from producers and what they will give to consumers. Ironically, the highly gendered business of selling clothes helps with this exploitation. Such is the power of retail MNCs that, globally, less than 2% of the people working at making clothes earn a living wage and 75% of these heavily underpaid workers are women aged 18-24 – MNCs sell cheap clothing to wealthier women, the cheapness of which is based on the exploitation of far poorer women[1]!
THE INCALCULABLE DAMAGE OF CLOTHING WASTE CHAINS..
Global supply chains for producing clothing are enormous, and every link in that chain produces forms of waste, “from the harvesting of cotton, to the manufacturing of fabric, to the assembly of clothes, to their sale, to their repurposing and resale, transporting apparel around the world creates significant environmental damage because it is mostly done via commercial shipping, which is among the highest carbon-emission-intensive modes of transportation (Anguelov, 2015)”. But once the sale of the clothing item is made and the consumer persuaded to use and dump the clothing as quickly as possible, the damage created by disposal begins – this takes place overwhelmingly in lower income countries, completing the cycle of exploitation by dumping increasing waste in the countries exploited to produce it.
From the growth and processing of cotton and manufacture of synthetic fibres to garment disposal, dozens of chemicals (72 identified by the industry as toxic) flood the clothing production chain, many of which cannot be purified. As instafashion is put together in an accelerating stream, it produces more CO2 than international flights and shipping put together, a carbon footprint bigger than all of the countries in the EU put together (Global Carbon Atlas, 2023).
To lower prices for consumers, clothing MNCs need to keep their costs low and accelerate the speed of clothing use. If, as the World Bank indicates, 20% of global water pollution is created from dyeing run-off and rinsing, accelerating production accelerates waste of water – some researchers argue that textile production is globally “the most polluting industrial sector that produces goods for mass consumption” (Anguelov, 2015).
Retailer sale and return practices worsen the situation already created by persuading consumers to use and dump clothes rapidly; returning clothing for a refund or replacement equates to between 15-40% of all goods purchased online, for instance. The rates of return in the US have risen by more than 50% since 2020 alone[2]. Of the 70 pounds (weight) of clothes disposed of a year by US consumers, 73% ends up in landfill:
NOCYCLING
The PR firms, advertisers and lobbyists representing clothing manufacturers would like us to believe that a new era of recycling, organic production and reduction of CO2 levels to zero is here. But this is just camouflage, fairy dust sprinkled on top of the relentless, writhing mass of waste. 97% of materials used to make clothing is new, ‘virgin’ and 3/4 ends up in landfill or burning – brands such as HMV and Burberry famously burn clothes to limit available product range.
There is no such thing as eco-fashion – the idea just pushes people towards more consumption of more expensive, ‘ethically better’ clothes, as the global mass of normal fashion underlying eco-fashion expands. Mass global textile production targeting over-consumption, of whatever kind, automatically results in damage to the environment: “If an industry specialist indicates “no environmental harm” that means that there is such a state, and there is not such a state.” (Anguelov, 2015)
In terms of recycling, US and UK citizens send such a vast amount of clothing to charity that over 50% goes straight to recyclers, who send it abroad. In 2020 the top exporters of used clothing were United States ($600M), China ($404M), United Kingdom ($315M), Germany ($304M), and South Korea ($276M). In 2020 the top importers of used clothing were Ghana ($182M), Ukraine ($158M), Pakistan ($136M), United Arab Emirates ($132M), and Nigeria ($124M). Africa is overwhelmingly the destination of much of the clothing, through the black/grey legal obscurity of second-hand markets… But clothing dumpers are always looking out for new semi-legal/illegal dumping zones, zones which will expand rapidly as the global clothing supply increases rapidly to 2030.
Waste clothes in the Atacama Desert in Chile (Source: Al Jazeera, 8/11/21)
ENDLESS PROFIT FROM ENDLESS WASTE
The monstrous growth of clothing supplies is open and obvious, and the figures show beyond doubt that ‘recycling’ and ‘organic’ initiatives are having no effect – they’re overwhelmingly voluntary and there is no legal cost to clothing MNCs in disobeying them. Governments and transnational institutions have simply put the textiles and clothing industries outside the law, and seem happy with the monstrous environmental destruction that this causes. This is not because this MUST happen, but because of political weakness in doing anything to stop it.
But the point of this blog is to show, not just that profit causes waste, but that waste accelerates profit. The control of clothing/textile supply chains, the minimization of labour costs, the placing of production where environmental concerns are ignored or not regulated, all contribute to this. The accelerating production of clothing to richer areas is located where water and soil pollution and production costs can be minimized and where labour costs are firmly controlled.
Because production is located in these areas, cheap and effective transport to areas where profit can be maximized accelerates CO2 production and chemical pollution; persuading consumers to use these clothes as quickly as possible rapidly increases clothing waste… and accelerates profit for clothing MNCs. Fashion is waste – instafashion makes profit from increasing waste.
It’s not rocket science, is it?
References
Anguelov, N., 2015. The dirty side of the garment industry: Fast fashion and its negative impact on environment and society. CRC Press.
Carbon Trust (2011) International Carbon Flows of Clothing, Carbon Trust – https://ctprodstorageaccountp.blob.core.windows.net/prod-drupal-files/documents/resource/public/International%20Carbon%20Flows%20-%20Clothing%20-%20REPORT.pdf
Changing Markets Foundation (2023) Trashion: The stealth export of waste plastic clothes to Kenya, accessed 18/4/23 at http://changingmarkets.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Trashion-Report-Web-Final.pdf
European Clothing Action Plan (ECPA, 2018), Used Textile Collection in European Cities (March 2018)
Environmental Audit Committee (2019) Fixing fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability, UK Parliament, Sixteenth Report of Session 2017–19, accessed 6/4/23 at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvaud/1952/1952.pdf
Gereffi, G., and S. Frederick. (2010). The global apparel value chain, trade and the crisis: Challenges and opportunities for developing countries. World Bank Policy Research. Working Paper #5281. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Global Carbon Atlas (2023) accessed 14/4/23 at http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/CO2-emissions
Niinimäki, K., Peters, G., Dahlbo, H. et al. The environmental price of fast fashion. Nat Rev Earth Environ 1, 189–200 (2020).
[1] State of The Industry: Lowest Wages to Living Wages, The Lowest Wage Challenge, accessed 12/4/23 at https://www.lowestwagechallenge.com/post/state-of-the-industry
[2] ‘Counting the cost of fashion ecommerce’s unsustainable apparel return rates’ (2023) 3DLook, https://3dlook.me/content-hub/apparel-return-rates-the-stats-retailers-cannot-ignore/#:~:text=According%20to%20Statista%2C%20consumers%20are,of%20respondents%20had%20returned%20electronics