Sustainability in fashion encompasses a wide range of factors, including cutting CO2 emissions, addressing overproduction, reducing pollution and waste, supporting biodiversity and ensuring that garment workers are paid a fair wage and have safe working conditions.
[2][3] Measures to reform fashion production beyond greenwashing require policies for the creation and enforcement of standardized certificates, along with related import controls, subsidies,[4] and interventions such as eco-tariffs.
[5][6][7] In the early 1990s, roughly coinciding with the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, popularly known as the Rio Earth Summit, 'green issues' (as they were called at the time) made their way into fashion and textile publications.
[18] In 2012, the world's largest summit on fashion sustainability was held in Copenhagen, gathering more than 1,000 key stakeholders in the industry.
[20][21] In 2019, the UK Parliament's Environment Audit Committee published a report and recommendations on the future of fashion sustainability, suggesting wide-ranging systemic change, such as lowered value-added tax for repair services.
[22] Fashion industry followers believe the business sector can act more sustainably by pursuing profit and growth.
[23] The movement believes that clothing companies should incorporate environmental, social and ethical improvements on management's agenda.
[22] Aesthetic and social preferences of fashion change over time, leading to some items becoming obsolete and affecting garment lifespans.
[29] The fast fashion business model became dominant in the 21st century, leading to an increase in consumption of inexpensive garments.
[36] Shein alone was responsible for about 706 billion kilograms of greenhouse gases in 2015 from the production of polyester textiles and uses up hundreds of gallons of water per garment.
Workers from Shein are reported to make as little as 4 cents per garment produced, as well as operating on 18-hour workdays with 1 day off per month.
[45] A slow-fashion garment often consists of durable materials, traditional production techniques, or design concepts that are seasonless or will last for more than a season.
[46] The Anglo-Japanese brand People Tree was the first fashion company to receive the World Fair Trade Organization product label in 2013.
[55] According to a study done by Irene Maldini, keeping garments longer does not translate into lower volumes of purchased units.
[58] Globalization has made it possible to produce clothing at increasingly lower prices that many consumers consider fashion to be disposable.
[67] If no progress is made to reverse the effect, it has been calculated that there will be an increase of 850 metric tons of plastic debris in the ocean by 2050.
Most textile fibers in consumer fashion are amalgamations of various materials to achieve flexible or aesthetic properties, and thus not optimal for circular reproduction.
[89][90] As noted by Levänen et al. (2021), the lowest global warming impacts are achieved by reducing consumption, followed by reusing and recycling.
[99] However, only around 1% of recycled clothes are turned into new items, primarily due to the difficulty and high cost of separating mixed and blended textiles.
[17] There are many ways designers are trying to experiment with new models, often in relation to Alvin Toffler's notion of the "prosumer" (a portmanteau of producer and consumer).
[117] During processing, manufacturers may add bleach and various other chemicals and heavy metal dyes to make cotton pure white.
Researchers have found that members of a cotton bollworm species, Helicoverpa zea, were Bt-resistant in some crop areas of Mississippi and Arkansas during 2003 and 2006.
[128] However, soy fabrics fell out of public knowledge during World War II, when rayon, nylon and cotton sales rose sharply.
[133] Furnished by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, associate professor Young-A Lee and her team had grown vats of gel-like film composed of cellulose fiber, a byproduct of the same symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeast (abbreviated SCOBY) found in kombucha.
Most commercially produced silk involves feeding worms a carefully controlled diet of mulberry leaves grown under special conditions.
[138] Oxfam reported in Spring 2021 on a project in Afghanistan being undertaken jointly with the Burberry Foundation and PUR Projet, working with goat farmers.
Manufactured cellulosic fibers include rayon made from bamboo and wood, lyocell (also known under the brand name Tencel) and polylactic acid.
Generally, this method is as follows: plastic bottles are compressed, baled and shipped into processing facilities, where they will be chopped into flakes and melted into small white pellets.
[147] Alexander Bismarck and Mitchell Jones from the University of Vienna have conducted research on the possibility of using fungal species to create sustainable leather alternatives.
[154] A major controversy on sustainable fashion concerns how the "green" imperative is used as a cover-up for systemic labor exploitation, social exclusion and environmental degradation, what is generally labelled as "greenwashing".