ByBrooke Roberts-Islam,
Senior Contributor.
Anyone working in the fashion industry and expecting logic is perhaps the orchestrator of their own disappointment. Fashion is a consumer goods industry that beats to the arrhythmic heart of popular culture, celebrity, and commerce—it expresses our values and aspirations with an ephemerality that doesn’t abide logic, but the way it’s made most certainly must.
Fashion is dirty, and it’s getting dirtier. Like all industries, its collective climate target is to decarbonize to net-zero emissions by 2050, and it’s getting further from that goal, not closer.
Global fiber production volumes increased again last year, reaching 132 million tonnes and the textiles they become require vast quantities of chemicals (made from fossil fuels) and hot water (usually heated by burning fossil fuels). Polyester is particularly greedy, requiring extremely high temperatures (and energy consumption) when dying, and is itself made from fossil fuels. It’s our favourite fiber, though—we consumed more than 77 million tonnes of it last year.
