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No One Knows How Many Clothes Are Made. Why Won’t Brands Tell Us?

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16 Jul, 2024

This post was originally published on Good on You

Mountains of textile waste keep piling up around the world, making clear we’re producing far too many clothes. But just how many remains a controversy. 

100 billion question marks

In an industry infamous for misinformation, one basic number we should know by now is how many clothes are made each year. But no one in the industry has a clear answer.

Certainly, there are estimates about clothing production volume, but they are nearly impossible to verify. Production allegedly doubled in the 2000s with the rise of fast fashion—surpassing more than 100 billion garments a year in 2014, according to a report from McKinsey. But other estimates have varied widely, putting the number anywhere between 80 and 150 billion garments a year. Many in the sustainable fashion space still cite these estimates despite the fact that they don’t seem based on scientific evidence or verifiable data. And they’re increasingly out of date. The 100 billion estimate is nearly a decade old—a decade that has seen the cultural acceleration of ultra-cheap, disposable fashion thanks to the likes of SHEIN, Boohoo, and more.

While searching for an accurate number leads to dead ends, what’s clear is that too many clothes are produced each year. And despite all the lip service they give transparency, brands won’t tell us.

According to Fashion Revolution’s Transparency Index 2023, a stunning 88% of 250 of the world’s largest brands don’t disclose their annual product volumes—up by 3% since 2022—despite an endless, echoing call from advocates, citizens, and executives for fashion to reduce its negative impact.

What’s stopping brands from sharing such a basic dataset? The answers to that question reveal the dynamics keeping the industry from making significant progress on overproduction, the waste crisis, and overall environmental impacts.

 

Fashion’s misinformation problem

The fashion industry’s inconsistent data—whether that’s issues with brand disclosure or more foundational, research-driven analysis—has long been a point of contention.

“This misinformation problem is deeply entrenched,” explains Sandra Capponi, co-founder of Good On You. “It’s the very thing that led us to founding Good On You in the first place: to help people see through the greenwashing and get info they can trust. But when ultra fast fashion brands like Boohoo and SHEIN are shouting out about their sustainability credentials, we know the problem is massive and the consequences very real.”

A prickly combination of irresponsible marketing practices, a lack of funding for peer-reviewed research, and a general lack of oversight of science-based methodology standards may be partly to blame for the industry’s lingering misinformation.

But despite a range of industry initiatives, there is no legally-binding, industry-wide, or globally objective way of auditing a fashion brand’s responsibility performance. The industry largely operates based on voluntary disclosure from brands, and in a regulatory environment where brands are not obliged to disclose such information, it is fashion and apparel companies themselves that are failing to be more transparent. That said, a range of measures from the European Union, including its Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the proposed digital product passport, may soon change that by mandating certain disclosures.

“I think [brands] would say it’s hard to keep track because of complex supply chains,” says Ruth MacGilp, a spokesperson for Fashion Revolution, a London-based charity that has published an annual report since 2017 to account for fashion’s transparency efforts. “[Fashion Revolution’s] argument is that every business should know its output. The reason they’re not telling us is that these numbers represent such a huge amount of products: it’s disgusting.”

Certainly, it’s difficult for anyone to wrap their heads around the complexity of fashion’s supply chains, Capponi explains. “It’s difficult for brands to even know where a garment has been and who has touched it before it arrives in the store or on your doorstep,” she says. “But brands have a responsibility to do better.”

 

Production and waste at an unforeseen level

To understand fashion’s unprecedented overproduction crisis, you only need to survey the landfills. As with production volume, it’s hard to get an accurate estimate of textile waste. In fact, we don’t know how much clothing is actually sent to landfills. One estimate noted more than 92 million tonnes of textile waste may be created each year, though much like other fashion statistics, the source and methodology behind this estimate are hard to trace. But the mountains of clothing waste dumped on countries from Ghana to Chile make clear the problem is only getting worse, and as the 2023 Textile Exchange Material Market Report revealed, global fibre production per person has increased from 8.3 kilograms in 1975 to 14.6 kilograms per person in 2022.

The emotional response to waste and production on this scale—particularly when it comes to fast fashion—speaks to an industry-wide bewilderment with how such numbers are even possible.

In spring 2022, for example, an infographic about SHEIN’s “incomparable churn” sent shockwaves through the industry. SHEIN had reportedly uploaded more than 300,000 individual new styles to its website year to date, Business of Fashion reported. That number blew the original architects of fast fashion (H&M Group, Inditex, Boohoo) out of the water. The data—which was originally compiled by analytics platform EDITED to help fashion decode the brand’s ultra fast business model—highlights the tension between certain industry leaders who see numbers of such a scale as a mark of business success and others who condemn the practice as an irresponsible affront to a planet in crisis.

Such an uncomfortable clash of ideologies gets to the crux of emerging degrowth principles that are slowly taking hold in many corners of the industry. A rejection of the fast fashion business model; decoupling the production of cheap garments from profitability, and ultimately producing fewer garments (that we repair instead of discard) are examples of core strategies that the sustainable fashion movement is trying to grapple with.

But as Fashion Revolution’s Transparency Index alludes to, implementing this work at scale is immensely challenging without reliable data to work from.

“The reason the Index exists is to incentivise brands to be more transparent,” MacGilp says. “We hope that with more brands disclosing, it’ll be a knock-on effect for industry-wide change.”

 

Hiding behind the complexity of it all

If trying to picture mountains of unwanted textiles seems intimidating, try visualising the network of the fashion industry’s global supply chain. Across different regions, stakeholders, tier suppliers, and shipping routes from farming to fabric, it’s a level of complexity that continues to escalate according to fashion’s freewheeling growth objectives. And no brand’s supply chain is quite like another’s.

“Sometimes we assume that brands and corporations’ internal operations are very much the same: that one system’s organisation exists like another,” says Natalie Grillon, founder of Open Supply Hub whose work includes mapping more than 90,000 facilities in the apparel sector to clean, standardise, and open up those data sets. “What we’ve found working with brand supply chain information is that this is very much not the case.”

Divergences in digital tracking tools and how data exchange happens across team structures is where fashion gets lost in its own “complex supply chain” mess, Grillon explains.

“If a brand is working with an agent, for example, it may not be possible to have per factory or per facility data: it’s difficult to know how much product they make if they don’t know their supply chain directly.”

But it’s more than likely that the biggest players in fashion have a sense. And they may be hiding behind the complexity of it all, Grillon admits: “On an aggregate level, they probably know.”

“Let’s not pretend that every brand and corporation is on board with this transparency and sustainability agenda—and let’s not pretend that all consumers are either,” Grillon reminds us. “The majority of people are still not aware that there’s a waste problem in this industry.”

Despite extensive sustainability strategies from companies (and the personal efforts of many well-intentioned individuals embedded within them), the industry-wide disconnect between brand-speak and the waste they generate undermines the values they claim to be built on.

In a now legendary viral TikTok video, New York-based waste consultant Anna Sacks (known as “The Trash Walker”) read out consumer-friendly sustainability copy from Coach’s repair program (eg “don’t ditch it—repair it!”) while showing the slashed handbags she’d recovered from a Coach store’s dumpster—they’d been deliberately damaged and dumped by its staff for tax write-off purposes. The incident was so detrimental to the brand that Coach issued a statement in response, claiming that “the damaged product that was being destroyed in stores represents approximately 1% of units globally.”

 

Empowering consumers to act

It’s clear that getting brands to tell us how many clothes they make depends on this agenda being elevated in as many public domains as possible: increasing the pressure on fashion to publish its impact.

The stakes are real. Greater transparency is an essential first step in addressing the industry’s overall impacts, says Capponi. But she also argues that perfect can’t be the enemy of progress.

“Like most things, there’s a balance.” Capponi co-founded Good On You after recognising that consumers wanted to shop more sustainably but, because of missing or poorly communicated information, didn’t know where to start. “We shouldn’t wait for perfect data to help consumers make better choices. We should give them the best information that we currently have access to and empower them to take action today.”

The swells of a mass movement interested in and insistent on addressing the question marks are building. What comes next must be a global commitment to accountability in which production volume disclosure is the rule, not the exception, within sustainability reporting in fashion.

The post No One Knows How Many Clothes Are Made. Why Won’t Brands Tell Us? appeared first on Good On You.

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1. Environmental impact of the digital economy

Digitalisation has a heavy material footprint in the production phase, and lifecycle thinking needs to guide every product decision. Consider that 81% of the energy a laptop uses in its lifetime is consumed during manufacture (1 tonne in manufacture is equal to 10,000 tonnes of CO2) and laptops are typically refreshed or replaced by companies every 3–4 years.

From 2018 to 2023, the average number of devices and connections per capita in the world increased by 50% (2.4 to 3.6). In North America (8.2 to 13.4) and Western Europe (5.6 to 9.4), this almost doubled. In 1960, only 10 periodic table elements were used to make phones. In 1990, 27 elements were used and now over 60 elements are used to build the smartphones that we have become so reliant on.

A key challenge is that low-carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same minerals. Material resource extraction could increase 60% between 2020 and 2060, while demand for lithium, cobalt and graphite is expected to rise by 500% until 2050.

High growth in ICT demand and Internet requires more attention to the environmental footprint of the digital economy. Energy consumption of data centres is expected to more than double by 2026. The electronics industry accounts for over 4% of global GHG — and digitalisation-related waste is growing, with skewed impacts on developing countries.

E-waste is rising five times faster than recycling — 1 tonne of e-waste has a carbon footprint of 2 tonnes. Today’s solution? ‘Bury it or burn it.’ In terms of spent emissions, waste and the costs associated with end-of-life liabilities, PCBAs (printed circuit board assembly) cost us enormously — they generally achieve 3–5% recyclability (75% of CO2 in PCBAs is from components).

2. Regulating circularity in electronics

There is good momentum across jurisdictions in right-to-repair, design and labelling regulations; recycling targets; and voluntary frameworks on circularity and eco-design.

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Significantly, the EU is rethinking its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) management targets, aligned with upcoming circularity and WEEE legislation, as part of efforts to foster the circular economy. A more robust and realistic circularity-driven approach to setting collection targets would better reflect various factors including long lifespans of electronic products and market fluctuations.

Australia and New Zealand lag the EU’s comprehensive e-waste mandated frameworks. The lack of a systematic approach results in environmental degradation and missed positioning opportunities for businesses in the circular economy. While Australia’s Senate inquiry into waste reduction and recycling recommended legislating a full circular economy framework — including for imported and local product design, financial incentives and regulatory enforcement, New Zealand remains the only OECD country without a national scheme to manage e-waste.

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Along with data security and digital tools, reuse was a key theme in the ITAD & Circular Electronics track of the conference. The sustainable tech company that I lead, Greenbox, recognises that reuse is the simplest circular strategy. Devices that are still functional undergo refurbishment and are reintroduced into the market, reducing new production need and conserving valuable resources.

Conference presenters highlighted how repair over replacement is being legislated as a right in jurisdictions around the world. Resources are saved, costs are lowered, product life is extended, and people and organisations are empowered to support a greener future. It was pointed out that just 43% of countries have recycling policies, 17% of global waste is formally recycled, and less than 1% of global e-waste is formally repaired and reused.

Right to repair is a rising wave in the circular economy, and legislation is one way that civil society is pushing back on programmed obsolescence. Its global momentum continues at different speeds for different product categories — from the recent EU mandates to multiple US state bills (and some laws) through to repair and reuse steps in India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Commission has done a scoping study to identify product groups under the Ecodesign framework that would be most relevant for implementing an EU-wide product reparability scoring system.

Attending this event with the entire electronic waste recycling supply chain — from peers and partners to suppliers and customers — underscored the importance of sharing best practices to address the environmental challenges that increased hardware proliferation and complex related issues are having on the world.

Ross Thompson is Group CEO of sustainability, data management and technology asset lifecycle management market leader Greenbox. With facilities in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, Greenbox Group provides customers all over the world a carbon-neutral supply chain for IT equipment to reduce their carbon footprint by actively managing their environmental, social and governance obligations.

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