Too often, though, we take these ‘facts’ at face value, falling for their simplicity and forgetting to test their veracity. Most people do so unwittingly and with the best of intentions. But could spreading half-truths and supporting hearsay be doing the movement more harm than good?
If there’s one ‘statistic’ that’s become synonymous with the sustainable fashion movement over the past decade, it’s this: the global fashion industry is the second most polluting industry after oil.
This one-liner, or some version of it, does everything it should – shocking in its brevity and haunting in its conciseness, it’s the ideal rallying cry to inspire consumers to pause at the checkout and to pressure brands to strive for something better. Repeated across numerous company mission statements and intoned at countless panel discussions, it’s become so ingrained that few have thought to question its legitimacy. It feels true – but the problem is, there’s no real evidence, and certainly no source, to back it up.
Taken as a whole, the production, distribution and consumption of clothing – from cotton field or chemical factory to landfill – makes fashion one of the planet’s most resource-intensive, and pollutive, industries.
