Fashion and Fossil Fuels by Changing Markets
Textile waste and old clothing is embedded into the sand of the beaches around Accra. Image: The OR Foundation
We all know plastic is ‘bad’; from disposable coffee cups to straws and now face masks, the stuff is everywhere - ubiquitous, toxic, seemingly indestructible. Last year, for the first time, scientists found micro plastics in the placentas of unborn babies - and 7,000 metres below the Pacific Ocean's surface in the Mariana Trench. But what most people do not yet grasp is that most textiles today are made from plastic-based or synthetic fibres, particularly in clothing. Launched earlier this month, a new report examines the way synthetic fibres underpins fast fashion, a business model which is wreaking havoc on people, planet and nature itself.
Fossil Fashion: The Hidden Reliance of Fashion on Fossil Fuels, launched last month by Changing Markets, reveals the dangerously symbiotic relationship between two destructive industries. “Fast fashion and the runaway consumption of clothes has been under scrutiny over the last decade and has been denounced by NGOs, journalists and concerned citizens alike,” says Urska Trunk, Campaign Manager at the Changing Markets Foundation. “What is still less well known is that this overconsumption of fashion is enabled by cheap synthetic fibres, which are produced from fossil fuels, such as oil and gas.”
The stats are awful. “The use of synthetic fibres, especially polyester, has doubled since 2000, and is already present in over two thirds (69%) of textiles we use today,” says Trunk. “That’s projected to skyrocket to 2030, meaning that, if nothing changes, in 10 years time, nearly three quarters of total global fibre production will be made from fossil fuels.” Most of this - 85 % - will be polyester and most of it will end in landfill. Brands now churn out up to 20 collections a year while people buy 60% more clothes than 15 years ago, wearing them half as long. Global production is projected to leap from 62 million tonnes in 2015 to 102 million tonnes in 2030.
The future is plastic?
Just what is polyester’s appeal? It’s desperately cheap because there’s so much of it, plus it’s almost literally indestructible: polyester can take up to 200 years to degrade in landfill. Threatened on the energy front as renewables begin to take their rightful place in energy, the oil and gas industries appear fine about this. “They’re betting on plastic as revenue from other sectors, such as transport and energy, declines,” points out Trunk. “It is estimated that plastics will continue to make the majority of future oil demand growth. For example, BP’s energy scenario presumes 95% of future growth in oil demand will come from plastic production.”
Suddenly, plans by Jiangsu-based synthetic textile giant Hengli’s to tap China’s abundant coal reserves to produce polyester yarns instead of oil fall into context. Shockingly, the ‘sustainable apparel’ sector isn’t helping. “Our investigation reveals that numerous industry-led initiatives in the ‘sustainable apparel’ sector try to portray polyester as more sustainable than natural fibres,” says Trunk, ruefully. “For example, one of the most widely used tools in the fashion industry, Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Material Sustainability Index (MSI), which compares the sustainability of different fibres, assesses that synthetic fibres are better than natural fibres.
“Alarmingly, these assessments are being used to make concrete decisions about future fibre demand and production,” she continues. “For example, brands signing up to the Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) Pulse intend to replace 30% of their cotton with polyester by 2030.” At issue is a scoring system, by Higg MSI, that “only looks at the impacts of fibres from production to sale and does not address what happens in the use and end-of-life stages, when microfibre pollution takes place, and the majority of clothes end up incinerated, dumped in the environment or in landfill.”
Lacking incentive
Making fashion from recycled polyester is, says Trunk, offers the proverbial bandage over the bullet wound. Almost all recycled polyester comes from recycled PET bottles, which is already able to be recycled in a closed-loop bottle-to-bottle recycling system. “Diverting bottles from a closed-loop system and turning them into polyester for clothing is a one-way ticket to landfill or incineration, and risks perpetuating downcycling,” she explains. “Brands are also greenwashing their image by using fishing nets or ocean plastic to make their clothes.
“While these products may help raise awareness of how much recyclable material is thrown out or ends up in the ocean, making garments out of plastic waste will not even approach stemming the plastics crisis, and does very little to stop the flow of plastics into the environment in the first place,” Trunk continues. At the same time, using recycled polyester comes nowhere near the problems of microfibre release. “Currently, less than 1% of clothes are recycled to make new clothes, with some experts saying this may even be as low as 0.1%,” says Trunk.
“With an abundance of cheap fossil fuels and virgin synthetics, and a lack of mandatory targets for recycled content in textiles, the fashion industry today has no incentive to collect recycled content and find a new use for it. At such a small scale and with significant technological obstacles to overcome, it’s unlikely that currently available recycling technologies will be a silver-bullet solution to fast fashion’s problems in the short to medium term.” Given the time frame we have to work with, the only answer is legislation, says Trunk.
Textile strategy
According to the UN, the world is on course for a 3.2 degree spike in temperature, even if all commitments are met, a change that could prove catastrophic for life on the planet. Synthetics play a huge role in this: in 2015, the footprint of polyester production was the equivalent of 700m tonnes CO2, comparable to the total annual emissions of Mexico. That figure is expected to double by 2030. “It’s more urgent than ever to find effective legislative solutions to put the fashion industry on a more sustainable track, to push it towards great circularity and to put it in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal,” says Trunk.
There’s hope: the European Commission has announced it will publish a comprehensive EU strategy for textiles this year, a perfect site for change. “This strategy creates a crucial opportunity to tackle the global impact of fast fashion, by decoupling it from fossil fuels and making sure it shifts to responsible production based on the use of sustainable fibres,” says Trunk. “It’s also a chance to slow down production through a switch to more durable clothes with greater levels of reuse and effective recycling. Governments worldwide should follow suit and commit to developing ambitious legislation for the textile sector.”
Read the report here.
