This was the basis of a presentation commissioned by Gipuzkoa de Moda, for San Sebastián Fashion Festival 'Special 10th anniversary' that I delivered, virtually, on May 4, 2023

For about a year now, in what is loosely referred to as ‘sustainable apparel’, attention has been very much focused on greenwashing. Brands like Norrona, H&M, Decathlon, and Zalando, have, along with initiatives like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and its for profit offshoot - Higg Co. - all been publicly reprimanded. At the same time, legislation aiming at reducing fashion’s environmental footprint is already on the books in France and is planned for the EU as a whole. What to make of all of this? Can citizen consumers just sit back and allow brands and legislators to handle it? Or do we all have our own - possibly more important - part to play? To fulfill this, must we all engage in hours of research and analysis on the website of every brand that we are considering purchasing from? Is a Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) helpful? Do we even need a PEF, at all?

I would submit: no we don’t. We don’t need a PEF. We don’t need to do hours of research. We do all have a part to play, but it is: a) much easier than you probably think. And b) far from involving sacrifice, it might actually leave you better off - along with the planet.

Let me explain.

If you read the reports or go on the website of any major apparel brand or initiative that discusses and attempts to measure sustainability, you will be told that the environmental impact of any given item is determined at the factory gate, and that your options to shop more sustainably are largely restricted to switching from ‘conventional’, to ‘preferred’ and ‘more sustainable’ fibers.

Is this correct? Or is this marketing? Even if it were the case that ‘preferred’ materials had a lower impact than their conventional equivalent - and those who are familiar with my work will know that there is virtually no robust independent evidence to support this contention - would that be true? When deciding whether to purchase this or that shirt, is impact at the factory gate all that matters?

No it isn’t. Far from it. Your clothes are not pinchos. You don’t just wear them once. And the more times you wear a garment, by definition, the lower the production impact per wear will be.

Let me show you what I mean. Let ‘I’ stand for production impact. This could be measured in terms of a Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), or a Higg MSI single score. Or it could be the quantity of GHGs emitted, or water consumed. Whatever the metric, the same principle applies. This impact will be amortized over the number of times that garment is worn. Let’s call that number W. So we have

I/W = impact per wear

Now suppose we are looking at 2 shirts.

The first has an impact at the factory gate of 20. The second has an impact of 100. Conventional theory - the theory behind the Higg MSI or the EU PEF, is that the first shirt is more sustainable. But is it?

What if that first shirt is a cheap, disposable item that is only worn 5 times? Then the impact per wear, I/W is:

20/5 = 4

Suppose that the second shirt is a beautiful sea island cotton shirt that you will wear 100 times. Then the impact per wear, I/W is:

100/100 = 1

The shirt with the lowest impact at the factory gate is not the responsible option. On the contrary, the second shirt, despite having a higher impact at the factory gate, is the most sustainable of the two - and by a considerable margin.

And the superior environmental impact of the second shirt does not stop there. The person who bought the cheap shirt is not going out topless. After 5 wears they have to buy a new shirt, and another, and another. If they wear each 5 times, they will need 20 shirts to reach 100 wears. This of course means that at the end of the 100 wears, only one of the second type of shirt will enter the waste stream. But there will be 20 of the first type to dispose of.

This photo comes from an article published by the National Geographic last month. It’s a side view of part of a massive dump of unwanted, primarily plastic clothing, that has accumulated in the Atacama desert in Chile.

This is a second picture from the same article, this time taken from above,

Or as the National Geographic puts it, it’s: “An aerial view of a mountain of used clothes in the desert, the final resting place for fast fashion's rapidly-produced, inexpensive latest styles. Much of the clothing in this heap is made of synthetic materials that do not biodegrade.”

Together these 2 photos, I think, give you some idea of the extraordinary dimensions of “the great fashion garbage patch.” Similar dumps of unwanted clothing, primarily plastic, and primarily originating in the global north, are not just to be found in the Atacama. The dumps around Kantamanto in Accra, Ghana, are notorious. Whilst the next two images come from a Changing Markets report published in February this year, and they were taken in Nairobi, Kenya.

I don’t think we need any more evidence that the fewer clothes we throw out, the better it is for the environment.

But that is still not the end of the story. You will recall that our numerator ‘I’ could be any impact metric - water consumption, GHG emissions, a PEF score. Well now let's make it monetary impact, ie. the financial impact that clothing purchase will have on you, the consumer. There is a lot of talk about fast fashion having helped the poor, but has it? Is cheap at the till or check-out, really cheap?

Obviously, just as for environmental impact, that depends on how many times you wear the item concerned. Indeed data for the European Union shows that since 1996, the real price of clothing has fallen by about 30%, but consumers have purchased so many more clothes - the amount of clothes bought per person in the EU increased by around 40% over the same period - that the share of clothing in total household consumption has hardly fallen. Indeed, in recent years - the pandemic aside - it appears to have been rising.

Our little equation, apparel Impact = I/W, tells us why. If you buy clothes that appear cheap at the checkout, but only wear them a couple of times, the cost to you and your bank balance, per wear, may end up being much higher than if you bought an item that was considerably more expensive to purchase, but that you wore many more times.

We can illustrate this with the same numbers as we used before, but with the numerator representing financial cost rather than environmental impact. So, if your shirt cost €20 but you only wore it 5 times, the real cost to you was €4/wear. If it cost €100 and you wore it 100 times, the actual cost to you was only €1 per wear - a far better deal for you, and a far better deal for the planet.

I have to say that as we try to meet our 2030 climate targets, I find it very odd that we are unable to do something as simple as buying fewer, better, clothes, when it is so obviously in our own self interest, as well as that of the planet.

So, the lesson learned so far: if you want to control your own sustainability journey, and not be duped by greenwashing - before you buy anything, stop and ask yourself: How many times will I wear this? In fact you can apply it to furniture and appliances as well : how many times will I use this? Divide that number into the price and that tells you how much, whatever is, is really costing you, and probably costing the planet.

Apart from stopping each time to think: “how many times will I wear this?” Before buying anything, is there something else that we can all easily do to consume clothes more responsibly? Happily, once again, the answer is Yes.

This chart comes from a 2020, United Nations Environmental Program report. If you would like further detail, you can find it, and several other charts, all showing roughly the same thing, in a white paper that I published earlier this year with the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights, called “Amplifying Misinformation: The Case of Sustainability Indices in Fashion”. And you can find the links to that report on my website.

As you can see from the chart - and this may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, given the amount of time the sustainable apparel sector devotes to promoting fiber swapping as a solution - in terms of climate impact across the global apparel value chain, the use phase has significantly more impact - double in this particular example - than fiber production.

In other words, even if the data were correct - and it generally isn’t - choosing a garment based on whether the brand selling it tells you that it was produced with a carbon dioxide or GHG saving of - in the case of the example you are about to see on the screen, 13lbs - is far less important than how often you are going to have to clean this pale blue blazer, and how.

According to the care instructions on the website, it has to be dry cleaned. But the brand concerned - it’s a US company called Reformation - is so busy trying to sell more jackets, that it neglects to mention the carbon impact of that completely. It also doesn’t tell us how it calculated that “13lb saving”in the first place. Or compared to what exactly that saving is made. In fact, Reformation gives us no useful information whatsoever. The message is nothing more than an implicit permission to shop.

This really is the kind of greenwashing that you should avoid listening to, if you want to consume responsibly. Instead, think for yourself. How many wears will you get, before you feel that you have to clean this jacket? It’s viscose, so in my experience it will wrinkle easily, and it will be difficult to spot clean without leaving a watermark.

If you want a pale colored blazer, even if it does have higher impact in production, wool would probably be a better bet. Not only will a well made wool blazer last - reducing the production impact per wear, as we have already discussed - it will probably also have a much lower impact in consumption than the viscose alternative, because you will not need to dry clean it as frequently.

It is also worth pointing out, of course, that dry cleaning is not cheap, nor indeed, is running a washing machine and/or dryer. So once again, what is in the planet’s best interest - choosing clothes that will need to be cleaned less frequently, with lower impact methods like cool, short wash, and line dry - is also in your best interest. How neat is that?

So, let’s quickly run through a checklist of what we have discovered thus far: consumers play a real and profound role in making fashion more sustainable, and they can do this by only buying clothes that they know: a) that they will wear many, many, times; and b) that will not need frequent and/or intensive cleaning.

That said, this does not mean that the brand plays no role whatsoever, and it doesn’t matter what and how they produce, as long as all the clothes result in a high W or number of wears. Increasing W is only one way to reduce impact per wear. The other way - obviously - is to reduce I. The environmental impact in producing the garment in the first place. The lower I is, the lower I/W will be for any given W. So brands do have a very important role in lowering emissions at their end. How can you tell whether they are really doing that, or whether you are looking at greenwashing?

For climate change, the easiest way to reduce emissions is not as the brands and their funded initiatives would have us believe - by switching fibers. As we saw in the UNEP chart we looked at earlier, and which we will look at again now, the industry’s own data shows that on average, only 12% of lifetime GHG emissions are attributable to raw material production. Halving those would only reduce total emissions by 6%.

It is self-evident that we should start by focusing on the stage with the highest GHG emissions - manufacturing. As the UNEP chart shows, roughly 63% of lifetime emissions occur in spinning through dyeing and finishing, to assembly. A mere 10% reduction in emissions at this stage will result in a 6.3% reduction in the lifetime total. That is both greater and far easier to achieve than a 50% reduction in the impact of raw material production - or indeed, anything else. Fifty percent reductions are hard to come by.

How this very obvious truism has managed to escape notice for so long, baffles me. But now that we know: how can you tell if a brand is serious about sustainability, rather than addicted to sustainability marketing?

Well the first thing you don’t need is some unilateral declaration of a purported reduction in emissions, based on data that you are not even shown, let alone have a means of verifying. Indeed, I would actually avoid any brand that - like Reformation, as we just discussed, or indeed Shein, or BooHoo - tries to sell you stuff on that premise. Ask rather where the material that went into the garment that you are considering purchasing, was manufactured.

Why should you do that? Well, when this event is finished, head on over to “Our World in Data” - a very useful website that has data on pretty much everything of global interest. Check out their Carbon Intensity of Electricity page and you will immediately see - as this chart shows - that if the material used in the garment that you are considering purchasing was spun/knit/woven in Portugal, Spain, or France, it had a climate impact that was between 60% and 90% lower than the same item manufactured in China or India.

Of course, while electricity is the main source of GHG emissions in spinning, knitting etc, when it comes to dyeing and finishing, thermal energy plays a primary role. But China and India also derive their thermal energy principally from coal, and as Our World in Data also shows the carbon dioxide emissions factor for coke, lignite, and anthracite is between 75% and 91% higher than that for Natural Gas. Clearly, any brand that sources its material from generic mills in Asia, particularly China and India, but tells consumers to pay attention solely to raw material impacts, is attempting to deliberately mislead. It is greenwashing and such brands should be avoided.

So, if you have the energy to go the extra mile beyond just thinking about how often you will wear the piece, and how frequently and with what you are going to clean it, ask where the material was manufactured. I personally think that stating this should be obligatory. But it isn’t, and perhaps not surprisingly, most brands do not seem to want to tell us.

And finally, now that we have looked quite closely at the various aspects of environmental impact, let us not forget that sustainability and environmental impact are not synonymous.

Sustainability also has a socio-economic dimension, which we have all agreed to acknowledge and to adhere to since 1987, when the United Nations published “Our Common Future”, also known as the Bruntland report. This stated: “The environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions, and needs... the “environment” is where we all live; and “development” is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable” (pg. 13).

Moreover, as the Brundtland Report observes: “Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation” (pg. 54 ). UN members attempted to codify these concepts, first in the millennium Development goals in 2000. And then, when those goals were not realized, as planned, by 2015, in the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, with a target date for achievement of 2030.

No more Poverty, no more hunger, means exactly that. It is self-evident then, that a garment that was made by a worker who was not paid a living wage - by which is generally meant the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs - can’t be deemed sustainable, no matter what it is made of, or where. Consumers who wish to shop responsibly, should obviously only buy clothing made by workers paid a living wage.

Again, I think that brands should be obliged to declare this, but they are not. If the garment was made in a country like France, where the minimum wage is a living wage, this is pretty straightforward. Otherwise, not so much; the citizen consumer will have to go to the additional length of asking the brand concerned whether this condition was met, and then trying to sort through what may be a somewhat evasive answer. For instance, if you check out Patagonia’s living wage webpage, this is what you will find:

“As of 2020, 39 percent (12 out of 31) of our apparel assembly factories are paying their workers a living wage, on average.”

There are 2 things very obviously amiss with this statement: a) we are now 2023. What was the situation in 2021 and 2022? Was it better, or worse? Obviously, one suspects the latter, as the statement has not been updated. b) How many workers earned a living wage? That is the percentage that we really want to know. Firstly, ‘on average’ suggests that not even all the workers in those 12 factories earned a living wage. Moreover, the percentage of assembly factories that paid living wages only gives us the correct information if Patagonia sources roughly the same amount from each and every one of them. This seems unlikely. In which case, if those 39% of factories employed considerably less than 39% of the workers in its assembly supply chain, Patagonia would be greenwashing.

Simpler to ascertain, and equally relevant, is the question: “Who produced the fiber?” Farmed fibers provide a cash crop to some of the poorest on the planet. They are what enables subsistence cotton farmers in Benin or Burkina Faso, indigenous alpaca farmers in Peru, mohair farmers in Mongolia, and small holder silk farmers in Brazil, to purchase medicines for their parents, school books for their children, and shoes for all. It is obvious then, that the responsible consumer should ask whether the raw material that went into that garment promoted SDGs one and two - yes or no?

So, before buying anything, ask yourself how many times you will wear it, how you will clean it, where the material was manufactured, whether the fiber sourcing helped to reduce hunger and poverty, and whether the workers in the supply chain were paid a living wage.

Then there is one last rule of thumb that you can apply - or perhaps it should be the first that you apply - before buying any clothing: Follow the precautionary principle and avoid plastics whenever possible.

We all signed up to do this with the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992.

I quote Principle 15

"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

Our States don’t seem to be doing it, but we consumers can do it ourselves.

All clothes shed fibers. The concern is that plastic micro and particularly nano fibers, may be harmful to both people and animals. We don't need to be certain that this harm applies. We are already aware that it may apply and that it would likely be irreversible.

Scientists did not find cotton in the stomachs of deep-sea amphipods in the Mariana Trench. They found PET, which is what polyester garments are made of. It is not cotton that is causing fibroids in sea birds, it is Plasticosis - macro and microplastic-associated fibrosis. It is not cotton, or indeed silk, or wool microfibers in sewage sludge used as fertilizer, that are entering our food chain. It is plastic. Cotton microfibers have not been found in human placentas, but PET has been. Nor has Pre/post-natal exposure to cotton or wool fibers been shown to be a potential risk factor for autism spectrum disorder. But in mice, this was the finding for microplastic exposure. Depending in part upon how much of your wardrobe is plastic, you could be inhaling up to 22 million microplastics and nanoplastics annually, and nobody is actually certain what this is doing to your body. And please do not be duped into thinking that any of this is going to be resolved by switching to recycled polyester - which is, in reality, recycled plastic bottles in any case.

Given the lobbying potential of the multimillion dollar brands that lie behind both fast fashion and athleisure, and behind the petrochemical industry itself, I think it would be unrealistic to expect rapid action on any of this by our legislators and regulators. But each and every one of us can take our own precautions tomorrow. Restrict your plastic purchases to clothing where there is a real need for the fiber to be plastic. I'm talking about waterproof jackets, swimwear, and yoga tights. If we are talking about dresses, skirts, pants, and blazers - Don’t buy polyester, or indeed, PVC shoes and bags. Find something else instead.

Yet again, like so many of the recommendations that I have made so far, less plastic in your wardrobes is not just better for the planet - remember those piles of predominantly plastic clothing that we saw at the beginning of this presentation - it’s better for you as well. It may cost a little more, but isn’t your health and the health of your children worth it? And you already know how to mitigate the impact of that extra initial outlay in avoiding cheap plastic clothing - just increase the number of wears for your new natural fiber substitutes.

And one very last point. Repair and alteration can play a vital role in extending the longevity of a garment. For those of us who live in the global north, however, the cost of such services can approach or even exceed the purchase price or replacement cost of the garment concerned, and so makes no economic sense. In choosing whether, and where to purchase a garment, the availability of low cost repairs and alterations is something worth bearing in mind. In that context, I have just discovered that Zara are now offering such services in the UK at least, at rates - that as long as you drop off/pick up the item off at any Zara store - are considerably below the cost of providers in my area of London. If you purchase one of Zara’s more expensive and hopefully, more durable skirts or dresses, £15 to replace the zip begins to make economic sense

On that encouraging note, we have reached the end of today’s presentation. I really hope that the time that you have spent listening to me this morning will prove useful to you, and I would love to know whether a year from now, anybody in the audience will be able to say: yes, I changed my wardrobe purchasing practices, and both I and the planet are the better for it.

Right now however, I imagine some of you have some questions. I believe we have a few minutes left to cover these, so I will hand the floor back to the very lovely Laura Chamarro.

Thank you all.

Sustainable Fashion - Could it all be in the hands of the Consumer?

Veronica Bates Kassatly

Sustainable Fashion - Could it all be in the hands of the Consumer?

The Role of Natural Fibers in Sustainable Solutions

Amplifying Misinformation - The Case of Sustainability Indices in Fashion

Veronica Bates Kassatly