Skip to main content

Fashion Threads: Systemic Perspectives for Circularity

  • Published on August 20, 2021
This research is the first Brazilian publication responsible for analysing the socio-environmental impacts of producing the three most used fibres in the fashion industry: cotton, polyester and viscose. The desire to create a report on textiles is associated with urgent and necessary transformations to guarantee minimally stable living conditions on Earth in the face of a profoundly changing climate scenario in the next decade. 
 
The information, data and conclusions found here are not exhaustive, quite the contrary. There is a massive deficit of open and available sources, both in terms of commercial and economic data, as well as socio-environmental impacts caused by the production of textile fibres. Our main objective is to facilitate and increase access to open data; enable action from various professionals in the sector towards sustainability; insist on the importance of transparency on the productive network traceability, and highlight the importance of civil society's involvement in demanding transparency in national production chains and elaboration of public policies that foster the circularity of the national textile and clothing industry.
A few months after we started working
on this research, the new Coronavirus
pandemic paralyzed the world and put
the entire fashion industry to the test.
Some companies closed, others saw
their revenues plummet, sustainability
projects were temporarily paused for
budgetary reasons. For most companies,
the question was how to survive with
the slowdown in consumption, unemployment, and the economic instability
caused by a health crisis. However,
Covid-19 was also a big warning: our exploitative relations with nature and other
beings, which our socioeconomic model
is based on, have consequences. The
pandemic is a small sample of them.
We are moving fast towards a much
greater crisis - both in proportions and
consequences - the climate crisis. We
need to cut our C02
e emissions in half
to keep global warming at the 1.5ºC limit
by 2030, which would help make our
future - already compromised by droughts, floods, extreme heat waves, and
destabilizing ecosystems - a bit better.
The slowdown caused by the pandemic
resulted in an 8.8% drop in greenhouse
gas emissions (GGE). Still, the World Meteorological Organization report assessed the abundance of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere per ppm or parts per
million and the global average in 2019
was 410.5 parts per million, an increase
of 2.6 ppm, compared to 2018. In 2020,
the reduction was estimated from 0.08
to 0.23 ppm - within the natural annual
variability of 1 ppm. This means that flattening the curve will require us, primarily
political and business leaders, to commit
more to and take responsibility for the
climate issue.
The fashion industry has a big responsibility in this equation. According to the
Fashion on Climate report of the Global
Fashion Agenda with McKinsey and
Company, in 2018, about 2.1 billion tons
of greenhouse gases were emitted by
the sector. This amounts to 4% of global
emissions, or all France, Germany, and
the United Kingdom emissions combined. About 70% of this total came from
upstream activities, which are necessary
for manufacturing a product, such as
material processing and production.
On the other hand, the report points
out that only fifty large companies have
committed to proposals aligned with the
Paris Agreement.
According to the Fashion Transparency
Index Brazil 2020, by Fashion Revolution,
only 28% of the 40 brands analyzed
publish their energy use and carbon
emissions policies in their supply chain.
Concomitantly, only 25% of companies
publish their operations' greenhouse
gas emissions. A measly 5% publish this
information about their supply network -
where the largest proportion of emissions in the sector is found and includes
textiles' production. As the organization
reports, these numbers are well below
those analyzed in the global index, which
indicated 58% and 16% respectively for
these indicators.
 

External source(s)

Supporting document(s)

modefica-report-FASHION-THREADS-2021.pdf
English
Download
Download

You might also be Interested in