‘Brands have been getting away with murder’: Stella
McCartney and leading fashion figures on the fallout of Cop26
After Glasgow, there is a clamour for fashion
companies to increase their commitment to sustainability and supply chain
transparency – and for legislation to hold them to their promises
Scarlett
Conlon
Fri 26 Nov
2021 11.04 GMT
At the
Cop26 conference, high-profile British brands including Stella McCartney,
Burberry and Mulberry presented their visions for an ethical, sustainable
industry. Now, there is an increasing demand for all fashion companies to make
legally binding commitments to address the impact their supply chains have on
the environment. While hundreds of companies – including Gucci-owner Kering,
H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara – have signed up to the UN’s Fashion
Industry Charter for Climate Action, which sets science-based targets in line
with the Paris agreement, there is no obligation to take part, nor a legal
mandate to hold brands to account.
Leading
industry figures say that if fashion brands are to have any chance of having a
meaningful impact on the climate crisis, legislation is needed.
As recently
as 2019, the UK government rejected all suggestions – including a ban on
incinerating or landfilling unsold stock that can be reused or recycled, and
mandatory environmental targets for fashion retailers with a turnover above
£36m – made in The Environmental Audit Committee’s report Fixing Fashion:
Clothing Consumption and Sustainability.
Well known
for her ethical-fashion campaigning, McCartney, who staged her Future of
Fashion exhibition at the conference, tells the Guardian that the lack of
mandate is the reason “why brands have been getting away with murder and we are
in the critical state we are in”. Incentives need to be introduced for the
industry to clean up its act, she says. “The issue lies with the fact that we
have no way of measuring our harm as a collective. If we were to have a uniform
way … then brands would be forced to disclose their current [practices] and
make informed changes to their supply chain.”
The fashion
industry is currently the third largest manufacturer in the world, with
clothing and footwear estimated to be responsible for 8% of global greenhouse
gas emissions. At the conference this month, a trade policy request submitted
by the Textile Exchange highlighted that global fibre production has nearly
doubled this century alone, reports Forbes, going from 58m tonnes in 2000 to
109m tonnes in 2020.
Despite the
UNFCCC Fashion Charter for Climate Action also proposing new commitments
(including achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and the sourcing of
environmentally friendly raw materials by 2030) at the Glasgow event, Liv
Simpliciano, policy and research manager at the Fashion Revolution campaigning
organisation, says things need to speed up and more pressing questions need to
be addressed.
“While
there has been positive progress, it is still far too slow,” she says. “What
was glaringly missing from the conversation was the question of growth – both
in terms of financial growth and production volumes. With an average growth of
3-4% a year, the fashion industry must decouple financial growth from emissions
reduction. There is [also] an enormous lack of visibility further down the
value chain. This is where human rights and environmental abuse thrives, and
where we need more stringent reduction commitments most.”
To aid
this, Simpliciano says brands need to stop relying on second-hand data to
estimate emissions and collect their own to get the hard facts. They should be
forced to disclose their findings, and incentivised by governments to track
data across the supply chain to reduce their overall impact. Fashion
Revolution’s research shows that “just 17% of brands disclose their annual
carbon footprint at raw material”.
Dr
Antoinette Fionda-Douglas from the collective Generation of Waste says
businesses are still clinging to such “extractive and exploitative business
model[s] for as long as they can to make as much profit as they can, refusing
to accept that transformative and systemic change is required if fashion is
ever to be truly sustainable”.
Yet
Simpliciano points out it makes good business sense to produce better clothes
in smaller quantities. “According to the OR Foundation, brands overproduce
their SKUs by 20-30%. Some annually accrue billions of items that go unsold due
to failures in demand forecasting, so there is a business case for producing
less, producing smarter and producing better.”
Further
addressing the issue of degrowth, she says policy, industry and cultural change
need to happen simultaneously. “We cannot exactly tell fashion brands to produce
less, but we can encourage them to slow down, and we know that one way to do
that is through consumer demand, or legislation and financial incentives.” She
cites increased taxes for the culprits as one solution.
“Overall,
what we should be talking about more in the industry is ‘post-growth’,” she
adds. “This means moving beyond just producing less, and reaching a point where
the idea of success is not linked with the endless pursuit of growth and
monetary reward [but] where we can really start to value people over growth and
profit.”
In order to
highlight the need for brands to take responsibility, Generation of Waste
staged a huge installation in the high-profile blue zone of the conference. It
showed that while post-consumer waste accounts for 92 million tonnes of textile
waste generated globally per year, 57 million tonnes of textile waste is
generated pre-consumer. This is through a mixture of design, production and
distribution (with the latter responsible for filling the equivalent volume of
London’s O2 Centre 19 times annually).
“Too often,
solutions proposed by governments and industry place blame and responsibility
for waste on to individual consumers or citizens,” says Fionda-Douglas. “It’s
easier for big brands to push the responsibility while they go about ‘business
as usual’.”
Focusing on
net zero alone won’t create the change that’s needed, she argues: “As fashion
is so interconnected with other sectors such as agriculture and transportation.
Any new legislation needs to be holistic so it can create positive ripple
effects across the industry and affected communities.”
To make
tangible change quickly, Simpliciano says that brands should be focusing on raw
materials, “given that half the total greenhouse gas emissions, as well as over
90% of biodiversity loss and water stress, occur due to the extraction and
transformation of resources”.
Caroline
Rush, CEO of the British Fashion Council (BFC) which staged its Great Fashion
for Climate Action showcase at Cop26, tells the Guardian: “We need to slow down
the pace of the industry as a whole and invest in innovation to fast-track the
move to a circular economy.” Rush says that “brands and governments can develop
new techniques, onshore manufacturing and reskill workers, extending the life
of garments and fibres by reintroducing old materials into the fashion economy,
and bringing an end to the linear lifecycle currently associated with the
industry.”
During the
two-week Cop26 event, Burberry released an update on how it intends to address
its materials at source. Working with the Sustainable Fibre Alliance, its new
biodiversity strategy promises, among other things, to ensure that all of its
key materials – such as leather, cotton and wool – are 100% traceable by 2025.
“[These are] used most widely across our collections and contribute to our greatest
impacts,” Pam Batty, vice-president of corporate responsibility, says. The
brand is also “developing our approach to sourcing our materials from
regenerative agriculture systems, which will work with farmers to adopt
low-carbon practices for these key materials”.
In order
for all brands to make sustainable practices scalable, investment is needed,
says Fionda-Douglas. “There are incredible fashion organisations around the
world who genuinely care about their contribution to a sustainable future for
fashion, but there is not enough resource or investment for these solutions to
scale their impact in a sustainable way.”
Ultimately,
says Simpliciano, “we need to see willingness from our legislators to take bold
and unpopular action now”.
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