How to dress without destroying the environment? With polluting crops, energy-intensive factories and mountains of discarded clothes, the textile industry accounts for as much greenhouse gas emissions as air transport. It represents between 2% and 4% of total global emissions, not to mention its other impacts on the environment and biodiversity.
More than 100 billion pieces of clothing are sold worldwide each year, which in France means 10 kilos of clothing per person per year. One person at the center of this issue in the country is entrepreneur Julia Faure. She is the co-founder of the clothing brand Loom and part of the En Mode Climat collective, a movement of companies that wants to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fashion production. She has a simple message when it comes to clothing: "Buy as little as possible."
What emits greenhouse gases in the textile industry? Where does the problem come from?
In fashion, individually, each garment pollutes relatively little, because it takes relatively little energy to produce a T-shirt, relatively few pesticides to grow the 200 grams of cotton that will make that T-shirt and relatively few chemicals to dye a T-shirt. It's nothing like, say, what it takes to produce an iPhone. The real problem in fashion is quantity: A lot of clothes are produced. To give you an idea, in France alone, 2.5 billion items of clothing are put on the market every year. That's more than the number of cartons with six eggs. Nowadays, in our world, we consume clothes as if they were eggs. We break them, make an omelet and then buy more.
This brings us back to "fast fashion," to brands that mass produce in low-cost countries. But what causes pollution during this process: The production method? The energy used? The transport?
Concerning textiles' carbon impact, the share of transport is quite low, about 2%, for the same reason that the individual carbon footprint of a garment is quite low. A T-shirt is very light, it takes up very little space and container transport is highly optimized. You might think that it is the raw materials that emit a lot of greenhouse gases: cotton and polyester. But, in the end, this doesn't represent more than 30% of a garment's carbon footprint.
What emits a lot of greenhouse gases is the industrial phase. It's all the energy consumed by the machines to transform raw material into a garment, to go from the cotton field to the T-shirt. Harvesting cotton is intensive cultivation with big tractors and fertilizers that come from oil. The transformation into yarn requires huge machines and huge factories. Then it is knitted or woven, then dyed and, finally, made into a garment. All these industrial steps consume a lot of energy, mostly fossil fuels, which emit a lot of greenhouse gases.
You have 86.3% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.