Recycle your waste, fly less and drive smaller cars. As if being green wasn’t exacting enough already, it may now cost you the shirt off your back – quite literally. A report into the environmental impact of clothing and textiles industries has taken a dim view of both global manufacturing practices and consumer habits. However, critics say some of the recommendations are a little unsavoury.
The report, entitled “Well dressed?”, says that if the textile industry switched to organic cotton it would reduce its usage of toxic chemicals – such as insecticides, chemical defoliators and non-organic dyes – by over 92 per cent. And if you’ve ever wondered how the lifetime energy budget of an item of clothing breaks down, producing the garment and getting it to the shops takes 35 per cent, while laundering it accounts for all the rest.
Encouraging consumers to buy fewer clothes, choose eco-friendly materials like organic cotton or hemp, wash them less, keep them for longer and recycle them could all dramatically reduce the industry’s environmental impact, says Julian Allwood, who wrote the report with Søren Laursen, both at the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge. The report was commissioned by Biffaward, an environment fund managed by the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts and retail chain store Marks & Spencer.
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Allwood admits that it may be naive to expect us to wash our clothes less. However, he says, one answer could be a system of “eco-tagging” to make it clear to the consumer where clothes come from, the kinds of materials used and how they were made. Indeed, just last week Levi’s announced a new range of “green” jeans made entirely using organic materials.
Another option is to persuade the fashion industry to develop more durable clothing, so consumers would be prepared to make garments last longer.
“One option is to persuade the fashion industry to develop more durable clothes, so people make them last longer”
But some remain sceptical. For one thing, washing clothes less flies in the face of decades of marketing by detergent companies. “Consumer campaigns are all very well but for the most part they don’t produce any long-term change in behaviour,” says Paul Johnston of Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, UK. “It’s got to come from the top. It’s got to be government or industry-led,” he says. That is because typically the most effective way to drive this sort of change is to make such products cheaper, he says – which only comes from within the industry.
If he is right, it could be bad news for proponents of organic cotton. “It’s about 50 per cent more expensive,” says Allwood. What’s more, there is no indication that jeans made from organic cotton will last any longer than an ordinary pair.
Still, switching to organic would be welcomed by many. “Cotton has historically been one of those chemically intensive crops,” says Johnston. The trouble is that relatively few farmers have so far made that move.
Johnston says the question is not just about whether the cotton is organic, however. Sustainability is also an issue: as the report highlights, cotton farming represents a huge drain on water resources.
However, changing to organic cotton would not necessarily mitigate this problem, since organic farming may use just as much water as conventional practices. Just because cotton is organic does not necessarily mean that it is sustainable, says Johnston.
