SearchSustainable fashion: will government help bin throwaway culture?
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
The Marc Jacobs fashion show. Photograph: Peter Foley/EPA
The only place politics and fashion used to meet was on T-shirt slogans. But now the government is planning to take a more active role in your wardrobe.
I can exclusively reveal that tomorrow the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is using London Fashion Week as a launchpad for its new Sustainable Clothing Action Plan - not new regulations, but a series of green pledges from high street retailers.
Government departments don’t normally vie with the likes of Matthew Williamson on the catwalk. So this is new territory and conjures up disturbing visions of runway shows featuring ill-dressed ministers. But unless Lord Hunt, minister for sustainability, wears something truly spectacular, it’ll be a straightforward but significant announcement about government and industry working together to combat throwaway fashion.
The big deal is the calibre of high street signatories behind the plan, many of whom have come in for environmental criticism before:
• Marks and Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury have signed up to a range of actions to increase their ranges of Fair Trade and organic fashion, the take-back and recovery of unwanted clothing and supporting fibres and fabrics that enable clothing recycling.
• In addition, M&S and Tesco are supporting green clothing factories, animal welfare across their cotton supply chain and increasing consumer awareness on washing at 30C.
• Tesco is extending its traceability programme across cotton supply chains to ban cotton from countries known to use child labour. It’s also adding carbon labelling of Tesco laundry detergents.
• Nike will apply its Considered Design ethos to improve the sustainability performance and innovation of all its product ranges.
And then there are contributions from those who arguably were already leading the ethical space already:
• Adili and Continental Clothing: Continental Clothing has measured and reduced the carbon footprint of its clothing products. They are now working with sustainable online retailer Adili to promote carbon labelling to consumers.
• T Shirt and Sons - Already using organic cotton to manufacture their T-shirts, T Shirt and Sons is now developing the first Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified system for eco printing on organic cotton.
• Association of Charity Shops, Oxfam, Salvation Army Trading and Textile Recycling Association – will open more ’sustainable clothing’ boutiques of high-quality second-hand clothing and new sustainably-designed garments.
• The Fairtrade Foundation will increase the volume of Fair Trade cotton products, with a view to achieving least 10 per cent of Fair Trade cotton clothing in the UK by 2012.
• Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion – a centre to provide practical business support to the clothing sector on sustainability and fashion.
As one of the “stakeholders” who has been to some of the meetings to come up with this action plan, I’m heartened by a couple of points. At the first ever meeting I raised the question of cotton production and the use of child labour in Uzbekistan and Egypt being given “the brush off” by major retailers and players.
To paraphrase, the response was almost universally “dear girl, there is no way we can trace cotton from a global market and know whether child labour has been used.” I’m glad some retailers appear to have now found a way.
But will this action plan actually reverse, halt or slow down the problematic environmental footprint of our fast fashion binge culture that – lest we forget – means that the clothing and textiles sector in the UK alone produces around 3.1 million tonnes of CO2, two million tonnes ofwaste, and 70 million tonnes of waste water per year, with 1.5 million tonnes of unwanted clothing ultimately ending up in landfill?
And do these voluntary initiatives really address the evils lurking in the global fashion closet? Unless there’s a big surprise tomorrow, there is no mention here of a living wage or any commitment for overseas producers. They may not be fashionable concepts during a recession but it’s still a fact that in Bangladesh garment workers cannot afford to buy food thanks to the rise in commodity prices.
Finally, I’ve got between 5-7 minutes tomorrow with Lord Hunt, who is the face of the report (in the way that Kate Moss is the face of TopShop).
Got any short yet fashionable questions for him? Let me know below.
SOURCE: The Guardian 20/02/09
