Published by Thred. Written by Sopia Phillips.
2020 was a year of reckoning for the industry, which is now expected to continue making significant shifts towards more sustainable practices and generating less waste.
Photo: Thred., 2021.
The world is drowning in clothes. Though recycling programmes have existed for decades now, with little means of recycling jeans or dresses, of the 100 billion garments bought annually, 92 million tonnes of them get thrown out. By just 2030, that figure is expected to increase by over forty million.
Not to mention the synthetic fibres used in 72% of our clothes that take 200 years to decompose nor the fact that the apparel industry accounts for 10% of globalgreenhouse gases every single year.
It’s an environmental disaster that, until the initial outbreak of Covid-19, showed no signs of abating. In the wake of the pandemic, however, an opportunity was presented for fashion to pause and reconsider the importance – or lack thereof – of its outdated seasonal structure. To redefine business models and build a more sustainable, progressive future.
To this end, the pressure is on for brands and retailers to ditch the linear take-make-waste approach that’s been the industry’s backbone for a century and fix the mess that years of producing trend-driven, cheap clothes, often unethically I might add, has made. Forced into this new era of reckoning by the disruptions of 2020 as well as by consumers more conscious than ever before about the industry’s impact on the planet, fashion no longer has a choice but to welcome change. That, or risk going under.
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The Green Machine is a technological milestone as well as an economical one,’ says Erik Bang, Innovation Lead at H&M Foundation. ‘We are close to not only recycle blend textiles at scale but also making it affordable for all, killing the myth of sustainability being a costly compromise. We can’t settle for less if we’re serious about stopping climate change.
This is all in addition to our individual approaches to style, which have transformed significantly in recent months, resulting in a second-hand clothing boom, a rise in DIY, and more incentive to find fresh ways of wearing what we already own. Rent, resell, repair, re-wear, you name it, they’ve all become words ingrained into our modern-day fashion lexicon and the industry has taken note.
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