The Nation, April 22, 2021
Greenwashing Fashion
These days, sustainability is on trend. But the trend cycle of fast
fashion isn’t sustainable.
By Julian Epp
Around 15 million garments per week flow through Kantamanto, one of the
largest secondhand clothing markets in the world. The shopping center is
located in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and is stocked with once-donated
clothing that arrives in hundred-pound bundles, mostly from the United
Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Retailers take out substantial
loans to purchase the bundles, hoping to find worthwhile garments in
sellable condition. Yet almost half of what is bought is thrown away.
The excess clothing waste piles up in the streets, on the beaches, and
in dumpsites around Accra. One landfill in Old Fadama sits next to a
river and is over 30 feet tall, containing mostly secondhand clothing
from the market. The water near the dump is toxic, causing the surface
to ripple and bubble as if it were constantly raining. Some of this
foreign clothing flows into the sea, wrapping around itself and other
waste to create tentacles up to 25 feet long. These tangled masses put
local fishermen in danger, ensnaring their boats’ motors and weighing
down nets, which can leave them stranded or capsized. Clogged gutters
from the clothing waste lead to flooding and standing water, even after
only a light rain, increasing the risk of cholera and malaria for those
in the community.
Why is there so much secondhand clothing? Increasingly, it’s built into
the way we dress: fast fashion, the trendy, mass-produced clothing that
can be made quickly and at low cost, has had disastrous consequences for
the planet, while making the industry more profitable than ever. In
1960, around 95 percent of American clothing was made in the United
States. As this labor began to be outsourced overseas, brands were able
to cut costs while substantially raising production levels. By 1989, The
New York Times coined the term “fast fashion” in reference to the 15-day
period between an idea’s inception and when the physical garment hit the
racks. The Times described the target market as “young fashion followers
on a budget who nonetheless change their clothes as often as the color
of their lipstick.”
Since then, fashion has only gotten faster. Accelerating trend cycles
necessitate wardrobe changes for the style-conscious and upwardly mobile
at the pace of a Las Vegas revue, creating a demand for both more
manufacturing and a timeline of planned obsolescence. Thanks to fast
fashion, the average person purchased 60 percent more clothing in 2014
compared to 2000, while each garment was kept for only half as long,
according to a study by McKinsey & Company.
Liz Ricketts, cofounder of the OR Foundation, a charity that advocates
for alternatives to the current wasteful fashion model, has been
observing the secondhand clothing trade and its impact on Ghana for a
decade. Fueled by colonialism and unsustainable business practices, the
production of waste has only been increasing. “I saw how the
acceleration of fast fashion was creating a toxic disposable culture
across the entire industry,” Ricketts told The Nation. “Not just at the
fast fashion level, but at every price point and at every segment of the
industry.”
On a planet with finite resources but a global economy attempting to
produce infinite commodities, that surplus has to go somewhere. “Under
colonial rule, Ghanaians were basically required to conform to
professional dress codes defined by the British,” said Ricketts. “And
that was the entry point for Western dress and for the secondhand
clothing trade.” But even after the country’s independence in 1957, the
desire for Western clothing remained, entrenched by perceptions of
style, power, and wealth. Meanwhile, the Western world needed more space
to contain its underused clothing, as the level of churn increased. Buy
new, donate used. Out of sight, out of mind.
Earlier this month, fast fashion outlet H&M released a new commercial
with Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams. After a CGI-heavy sequence
accompanied by nonsensical sci-fi-style narration about evolution and
the future, superimposed text said the brand’s goal is “for all H&M
materials to either be recycled or sourced more sustainably by 2030.”
The YouTube comments section for the ad was disabled.
The truth is, while the transportation industry gets the bulk of the
coverage around climate change, clothing production accounts for 10
percent of the world’s carbon emissions. In response to increasing
criticisms, fast fashion brands like Uniqlo, Zara, and Urban Outfitters
have launched lines with a sustainable veneer: collections made with
recycled materials and sold alongside their standard, poorly made
options. The practice is referred to by critics—or just those who aren’t
on a brand’s board of directors—as “greenwashing.”
Maxine Bédat, director of the New Standard Institute, a fashion think
tank that analyzes claims of sustainability, says that brands are
attempting to commodify a movement started by young people. “I’ve seen
decks get passed to me where the trend teams of brands are saying,
‘These are the new trends to sell to.’ And it’s leopard print, military,
and sustainable,” she said. Over the past few years, H&M launched a
donation program in many of its stores, with the underlying goal
ultimately being to sell more clothing: “For every bag of textiles you
drop off, you’ll receive a discount card for 15 percent off your next
in-store purchase.”
“They’re making things that no one needs and that we don’t have
infrastructure to do anything with,” said Ricketts. “The fact that these
companies continue to overproduce while claiming to be working towards
sustainability is just ridiculous.” Zara, for example, offers around 20
new clothing collections each year, and the company’s founder was
briefly the richest person in the world in 2017.
The root of the problem, overproduction, is dismissed in favor of green
myth making and continued profit. Bédat blames this on a lack of legal
requirements, making sustainability completely voluntary to an industry
that would rather encourage continuous consumption. To combat this, the
New Standard Institute says it is currently partnering with legislators
to draft much-needed regulations. “Fashion is a resource intensive
process,” says Bédat. “To make that process exist within planetary
bounds and where workers are not exploited along the way is going to
take some rule-setting.
So far, the only emerging changes are coming from Europe, with France
adopting an anti-waste law early last year. But this law is likely to
exacerbate existing issues in places like Accra. Under the law,
companies are prohibited from disposing of unsold products, including
clothing, through incineration or sending them to landfills. Instead,
they are required to recycle or donate the surplus instead. These
donations are likely to be bundled up and sent abroad. As a result, for
those sent to markets like Kantamanto, much of clothing will still end
up in a landfill—just not one in France.
From the point of view of environmental scholars and activists, instead
of redirecting our excess, the goal of any policy on the intersection of
climate and fashion production should be degrowth. Ricketts proposes a
solution that would expand upon the traditional Three Rs kids are taught
in schools—Reuse, Reduce, and Recycle—by adding Reckoning, Recovery, and
Reparations. “If we don’t reckon with the roots of this crisis, then we
will just design a system that perpetuates those destructive power
dynamics,” said Ricketts.
Rather than waiting for an uncertain future with advanced recycling
technologies, Ricketts argues, we should focus on helping those in the
present. “We are seeing millions of garments go into the ocean every
day,” she explained. “We are seeing people starving and going into debt.
We are seeing people being killed by this clothing waste. So who is
going to take responsibility for that?” Lasting change would require
acknowledging the secondhand clothing market as part of these companies’
supply chains—an easy thing for those companies to disavow, when they
don’t make a direct profit from them. Extended producer responsibility
policies would have to include ecological reparations for communities
like those in Accra.
When a single T-shirt requires 3,000 gallons of water to produce,
keeping a garment in use for longer will do far more for the environment
than any new purchase. This circularity, which would have to be planned
for at the point of production on an industrial scale, is the lesson to
learn from Kantamanto. Ironically, while fast fashion brands claim to
support refurbishment, reuse, and upcycling, the hundreds of tailors and
seamstresses working in the market have actually achieved it. Residents
of the city are conscientious and deliberate reusers and recyclers of
clothing, with millions of garments finding a second life.
“Kantamanto is the largest reuse and upcycling economy in the world,”
said Ricketts. “It’s a model of everything that anyone in the Global
North is talking about wanting to see within the fashion system.” In
order to make fashion truly sustainable, the world will require
Westerners to radically shift our relationship to clothing itself. If we
don’t want to see clothes piling up in landfills and oceans, we’ll have
to put them where they belong: on our own backs.
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