Overcoming green-washing and misinformation in fashion
This article has been written collaboratively by Erin Skinner of Slowly Erin and Collective Fashion Justice’s Emma Hakansson.
The difficulty with sustainability in fashion
In order for ‘sustainable’ fashion to exist, we must reach a consistent understanding of what ‘sustainable’ really means – including what this entails and how it is measured. As major fast fashion brands insert themselves into discussions of sustainable fashion with an array of ‘eco-conscious’ claims, it’s important that both citizen consumers and policymakers are armed with the tools to correctly identify eco-fact from eco-fiction. However, the global fashion industry faces major obstacles in this undertaking.
A key barrier to the effective benchmarking of ‘sustainability’ in fashion is a lack of consistent, accurate, and publicly available data. Collecting information from the industry’s opaque and globally fragmented supply chains is challenging, and lax government regulation means that industry players aren’t required to share information on their environmental impact or production systems. This creates an industry norm that allows big brands to avoid transparency and accountability, continuing to operate unabated.
It's vital that we have legislation to increase reporting standards and transparency, and set clear boundaries for what is acceptable within the fashion industry. While newly introduced policies such as New York’s ‘Fashion Act’ and the EU’s ‘Due Diligence’ law are hopeful signs of this transition, there is still a long way to go. In the meantime, we as citizen consumers can arm ourselves against brands’ greenwashing by becoming better informed. Being wary of vague and misleading claims, evaluating credibility, and thinking holistically are some of the ways that individuals can improve their sustainability literacy and make more informed purchase decisions, to support an equitable fashion future.
Image: Extinction Rebellion protestors, via the New York Times
What is sustainable fashion?
Before we can explore whether or not clothes, shoes and bags are sustainable, we need to be able to define ‘sustainable’ – this is more complex than it may first seem.
There are many factors that make up product sustainability. Sustainability considerations include (but are not limited to) the carbon, land and water footprint of a product, how production might pollute water and airways, the energy involved in production, the end-of-life impact of a product and whether it is biodegradable, as well as a product’s biodiversity impact. We also need to consider the resources being used to produce clothing and whether they are scarce or not, the chemicals that may be used during production, and so on. There’s a lot to it!
This might seem overwhelming, but a simple way to think of ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainable fashion’ is through the following questions: ‘if we continue to make this product the way that we do now, will we be able to sustain a healthy planet at the same time? Will we be able to sustain a biodiverse ecosystem, a climate that remains below a 1.5C temperature rise, and a liveable planet? Or is this production system, this product, at odds with maintaining, even regenerating planetary health?’
Sustainability in fashion should also consider social implications such as the wellbeing of garment workers and whether they are paid living wages, as well as the wellbeing of non-human animals, who should not be exploited for fashion. But for now, let’s focus specifically on the planetary aspect of sustainability.
How can we measure sustainability?
Measuring the sustainability of different fashion production systems and products is difficult. While it’s important to and we can collect data to help us calculate specific environmental impacts – helping us to answer questions like ‘how many emissions were released in the making of this shoe?’ – we also need to be able to look more holistically. If we don’t, we don’t see the whole picture. For example, it could be easy to fixate on the fact that hemp requires a bit more water during production than alpaca wool. However, to decide from this alone that hemp is more impactful on the planet to produce, would be a mistake. Alpaca wool production is associated with far greater emissions and eutrophication – a process which can deplete water of oxygen, even resulting in dead-zones.
The data that allows us to know this is from what’s called a ‘cradle to gate impact assessment’. This kind of assessment looks at the environmental harms (or not) of producing raw materials, which are transformed into the kinds of materials that are ready to be made into clothes. Another kind of assessment is even more holistic, looking at a material’s ‘cradle to grave’ impact – which means exploring how the material is used and ultimately discarded, and how this adds to the overall environmental impact. These full life-cycle assessments are complicated, and not something the industry has yet perfected. Cradle to gate assessments are valuable in and of themselves, but particularly while full life-cycle assessments are still in progress across the industry.
From Fashion Revolution’s report ‘Fashion Transparency Index' 2021’
Lack of consistent data
A key challenge faced by sustainable fashion advocates, researchers, policymakers, and diligent consumers alike is a lack of consistent and accurate data within the fashion industry. For example, different life-cycle assessments may find different impacts for the same material – this can mean different brands may calculate their garment impacts very differently.
Fast fashion brands are notoriously foggy when it comes to reporting on their production across the entire supply chain, from growth of fibre crops to the number of actual items they produce annually. By outsourcing production to a host of independent contractors and factories across the world, fast fashion brands avoid responsibility for their resulting social and ecological impacts and harms (of which there are many).
At the same time, detailed independent reporting via government or market research are either non-existent or behind largely inaccessible paywalls. Without the ability to evaluate brands’ supply chains cradle to grave, we cannot accurately evaluate their sustainability credentials.
This effectively grants brands free reign to report on themselves and make sustainability claims that cannot be verified. Another side effect of this is the proliferation of misleading, dated, or inaccurate quick-stats spread by even the most well-intentioned sustainable fashion advocates. ‘The fashion industry is the second-most pollutive industry after oil’ is an example of this; a statement that has been repeated enough within sustainability circles that it is now considered fact, despite reports since at least 2017 of not being able to find the original source of this claim.
Ultimately, we are found in a vicious cycle; a lack of transparency prevents collection of accurate data, and a lack of accurate data prevents accountability from increasing transparency.
Image: David Cliff
Legislation and fashion sustainability
If we’re ever going to see a fashion industry that is more sustainable, we need an industry that is first more transparent, allowing for more consistent sustainability data to be collected and understood. To get this data, and then, to ensure brands act on their collective findings, we need legislation.
It’s clear now that the bulk of the fashion industry is not going to radically transform for the sake of a safer, more habitable planet – unless it has no choice. This is why legislation is such a powerful tool for change, and there are already some great examples of legal policies forcing the fashion industry to improve and evolve.
Some of the best known policies which have impacted the fashion industry include national and state-wide bans on fur farming and even fur sales. Legislation has also seen specific, dangerous chemicals used in textile processing and dyeing banned. In 2020, France banned fashion brands from destroying their unsold stock. Just recently, the EU passed legislation which aims to ‘put a halt on fast fashion by introducing rules on textiles to be used in the European market’.
In New York, a proposed bill referred to as The Fashion Act would demand a whole host of requirements from any international brand with a particularly high annual income which sells their clothes in New York (that’s most of them!). These include mandatory reporting on just how many garments they make each year (helpful for addressing the dangerously fast pace of fashion), setting science-based targets to act on the climate crisis, and more.
Legislation’s ability to improve the fashion industry is only as limited as the creativity of lawmakers and the fighting power of activists who rally for change.
Image: Sarah Olson
Consumer citizens need to be armed against green-washing
While legislation appears to be on the rise, this is a lengthy process, often taking years to come into effect. In the meantime, it’s important global citizens are armed with the tools needed to distinguish actual sustainability efforts from greenwashing so that we can move closer to a fair fashion future.
Sustainability is a hot topic, and pretty much all major fashion brands are getting on board… or so it would seem. A recent investigation by the Changing Markets Foundation found that almost 60% of materials claims from the UK and EU’s 46 leading brands, including H&M, ASOS, and Zara, are unsubstantiated and misleading. In fact, H&M’s ‘Conscious Collection’ was found to use more synthetic materials than their regular lines! This followed the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority’s findings that, of 500 brand websites reviewed, 40% used misleading advertising tactics to greenwash – such as the use of vague and unsupported terms like ‘eco’, ‘green’, and ‘sustainable’. Unfortunately, these tactics seem to be working: in a 2022 survey of 1,000 people in the UK, H&M, Nike, Primark, M&S, and Amazon emerged as the top five sustainable retailers according to participants.
While such destructive brands are able to successfully market themselves as a planet-friendly choice, they are unlikely to move above and beyond into legitimate fair fashion measures. Until adequate policy can give them the legislative push to do so, we as citizen consumers are able to step up and say no to greenwashing.
How to become more literate at fashion sustainability
The first thing we all need to do to become more literate and aware of true sustainability in fashion, is to put on our anti-green-washing goggles. So much of marketing doesn’t mean anything, and really, we shouldn’t be looking at brands themselves for answers on how sustainable they are – their primary interest is in getting us to fork out our cash.
Beyond this, it’s worth getting a reasonable grasp on how different materials impact the planet during production and at the end of their lifespan, by looking to independent, well referenced and science-based sources.
We can also ask brands about the sustainability of their materials and products – but only if we are asking for third-party, external references and data that support their claims. If a brand sends us information about material or product sustainability, we also need to be able to gauge the quality of the information and how reputable it is. Some general rules of thumb:
Information that’s simply written out, without any hyperlinks of references to original, peer-reviewed studies, industry or government data sets is bad. Anyone can write anything they want, so how are you to know if this information is accurate?
We should be looking to environmental experts when we talk about sustainability in fashion – scientists, academics and professional researchers. It’s okay to read information from people who aren’t scientists, so long as they are referencing experts themselves.
In summary
If you’ve ever felt confused by fashion industry claims of sustainability, or perhaps like you were being misled – you’re not alone, and you were probably right. Today’s fashion landscape is littered with false, skewed and incomplete information, oftentimes with these claims being used to green-wash people into making purchases they otherwise wouldn’t.
In order for this to change, we need improvement at every level: we need government action to legislate greater transparency and minimum sustainability requirements from brands, we need brands themselves to willingly engage with efforts towards these goals, and we need citizen consumers who are more literate in fashion sustainability, to help prevent green-washing by brands doing the wrong thing.
These aren’t small goals, they’re challenging and will need to be fought hard for – but this is the case with most significant and meaningful change. If you’d like to play your part in creating a more sustainable and transparent fashion industry, keep asking questions, demand more from brands and policy-makers, and share science-based, referenced information with your community.