A version of this article previously appeared on EcoCult. Read more here.
Maiyet’s range of colors resulting from their responsible wastewater initiative with an Italian factory
Oh, journalistic hubris. I had it bad after I published on Racked what I hoped would be the death blow to the oft-cited “fact” that “fashion is the second most polluting industry on the planet.” I found no basis for this fact, no research, no compilation of data. Once I shared this with the world, I expected everyone to read my story and stop using the fact. But of course, Fashion Revolution happened, and the fact continued to pop up in every article and panel, to my deep frustration.
The problem is, I had no fact to replace it with. All I could say was that we had no idea how bad fashion is for the planet, and we desperately needed research to ascertain that figure.
Well, the universe (or rather, the Danes) has provided. The Global Fashion Agenda, which is currently putting on the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, teamed up with the Boston Consulting Group to do some serious number crunching and put out the Pulse of the Fashion Industry Report. It’s a deep, deep dive into the fashion industry’s sustainability metrics and makes the strong business case for better resource management by fashion companies – innovate or die, as it were.
The report came up with its numbers for carbon emissions, chemical usage, and water usage by building on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Index, which provides a framework for brands to measure their own supply chain impact. That data was extrapolated out through expert interviews and weighting by company size and price positioning.
The number they came up with, a “Pulse” of 32/100, will be remeasured each year and serve to measure the industry over time, which is great. But it’s currently meaningless to consumers and advocates without context. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to the report frequently to harvest from its hundreds of data points. But for now, I would like to answer a very specific question:
Is fashion the second most polluting industry globally like everyone always says?
The report says that the fashion industry is responsible for the emission of 1,715 million tons of CO2 in 2015, about 5.4% of the 32.1 billion tons of global carbon emissions in 2015. (I’m going to caveat this next part to say that for global industry numbers, I’m working off of global greenhouse gas emissions, not carbon emissions. So we need to assume that the proportion of other gasses – methane and nitrous oxide – is the same in fashion as it is for other industries, which it should be because fashion is made up of these other industries).
TLDR; My calculations put fashion, as an industry, as less polluting than electricity and heat (24.9%), agriculture (13.8%), road transportation (10.5%), and oil and gas production (6.4%), and equal to livestock (5.4%). That makes fashion tied for the 5th most polluting industry in the world. It’s the sixth if you break electricity and heat production into its commercial and residential sectors. That is still really high for one industry, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
What is bizarre about doing this sort of analysis is that the fashion industry involves all the industries I just mentioned. Electricity (often from dirty sources like coal and diesel generators) powers the garment factories. Cotton is an agricultural product. A small portion of clothing’s journey is done by road transportation. Polyester is made from plastic, which is a petroleum product. Leather is a byproduct of livestock raised for food.
Which just reaffirms the power of fashion. If you could fix fashion’s supply chain and lower its emissions, you would be lowering the emissions of the four most polluting industries on the planet.
Fashion could, in fact, save the world.
What about water?
Sometimes I see the pollution fact as related to water pollution.
Unfortunately, the report did not talk about water pollution, but water consumption. So let’s start with that. In 2015, according to the report, the global fashion industry consumed 79 billion cubic meters of water, which is an enormous amount, more than electricity production, and is threatened by water shortages in cotton-growing countries. But that represents only .87% of the world’s 9,087 billion cubic meters of water used per year. Seventy percent of global water usage goes toward agriculture, which includes cotton, but also just food production. (Meat consumption accounts for 30% of the average American’s water footprint.) About 20% goes to industry. Twelve percent goes toward household and municipal use.
What can we take away from this as consumers? Perhaps that the industry does need to address fashion’s water consumption on a broad scale. But as a consumer, you’re better off reducing your meat consumption, especially red meat, if you are concerned about water, rather than fretting over your cotton garments.
But to address the water pollution facet, fashion is not likely the second most polluting industry. Agriculture is at the top. (I’m excluding inadequate sanitation because I’m not sure if one would consider pooping an industry. But that surely is a huge source.) Then there’s mining, which is another huge contributor. Also, the collective runoff from ground transportation. So that puts fashion in at least fourth place. That’s not to say this isn’t important to address, as the documentary RiverBlue makes clear. Fashion production is incredibly toxic, from the processing of fibers to the dyeing, and the leather tanning. But this is not where that fact comes from.
Read the rest of the story on EcoCult.
Also by Alden: These 3 Tips Are All You Need To Find The Ethical Wedding Dress Of Your Dreams
Related: It Takes 2700L Of Water To Make One T-Shirt. How to Reduce Your Impact
The Truly Mind-Boggling Way Our Synthetic Clothes Are Polluting The Oceans
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Photo: Maiyet
