It's time for the fashion industry to take sustainability seriously

Sustainability isn’t a word you often hear associated with fashion. Still, it will probably come as a surprise to most to learn that the clothing industry is actually the second largest polluter in the world, surpassed only by the oil industry. How is that possible? Are the clothes we wear really that bad for the environment?

textile waste

The fashion industry has a massive environmental impact
Well, if you consider that it takes about 2,700 litres of water to produce a single t-shirt and that we produce more than 80 billion pieces of clothing every year, it starts to make sense. Furthermore, 73 per cent of our clothes end up in landfills once they’re no longer needed, creating 53 million tonnes of waste every year. A lot of it gets incinerated as well, with the designer fashion label Burberry alone reportedly having burnt more than $36.5 million worth of unsold clothes in 2017. This seems to be a fairly common practice across the industry and is employed by many other brands, including H&M, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, and Montblanc. Although almost 100 per cent of clothing is recyclable, the fashion industry has notoriously low recycling rates – less than 1 per cent.



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