Today’s Piecemeal Responses Disconnect Social and Environmental Perspectives of the Fashion System
The fashion industry is fully aware of its global size and its social and ecological effects on a planetary scale, and many of its sustainability-relevant efforts involve working through a growing number of global multi-stakeholder coalitions (Fig. 1, Table 1).
The industry has long been responsive to accusations of problematic social impacts, such as sweatshops and exploitative working conditions [57, 58, 83, 84]. Twelve of the 45 initiatives are coded to be focusing on only drivers in Table 1. All these initiatives are focused on working conditions. These are often responses to local social issues and responding to individual social impacts such as the case of ‘The Fair Labor Association’ which was funded by a fashion business in 1999, after accusations of child labour and poor working conditions in Indonesia [83]. The notorious collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 was followed by the creation of two initiatives the same year [57, 58]. The 2012 ‘Daewoo protocol’ [85] prohibited using cotton from Uzbekistan due to media reports on the use of child labour (but not because of the depletion of the Aral Sea). The social drivers of the initiatives in Table 1 are overwhelmingly related to working conditions and workers’ rights. Occasionally these impacts pose risks to a company, but as Fig. 1 indicates, nothing has yet impacted the economic expansion of the global industry.
With media and consumers increasingly alert to environmental harms of the industry, 33 of the 45 initiatives tackle environmental problems. These efforts have largely been focused on production countries, but global businesses are beginning to recognise planetary-scale environmental priorities. The Fashion Pact [77] is an international CEO-led coalition committed to ‘stopping global warming, restoring biodiversity and protecting the oceans’. McKinsey, an international management consulting firm, published the ‘Fashion on climate’ report [86]. The UN-convened Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action is a multi-stakeholder initiative with global outreach, with a vision to achieve net zero climate emissions by 2050 [75]. The Global Fashion Agenda is a forum for collaboration and cooperation on sustainable fashion, which recognises that the fashion industry ‘[…] is pushing the earth beyond its planetary boundaries and challenging social justice’ [50].
However, seen in terms of our adaptive DSR framework, the industry responses are split along social and environmental lines. Just 6 out of 45 sustainable fashion initiatives deal with both social and environmental dimensions. However, the social focus of these initiatives is only aspects relating to working conditions, not on the social drivers. The industry is doing very little to manage the justice and equity effects of a growing globalised industry in an environmentally pressured world. Not addressing the drivers who have outsourced the production not only shifts the problem to a material problem, it also misses the link of social and environmental justice which is needed to make change of the dynamics keeping the industry unsustainable. Also, viewed from the dynamic perspective of an adaptive cycle, by setting ambitious targets for the global environment far into the future, they can be seen as postponing action on social impacts that are already evident. No businesses have yet cut emissions by 8% or more per year — as needed if net zero targets are to be met [87] in order to stabilise climate and minimise climate risks.
Material ‘Take-Make-Waste’ Perspectives Miss the Powerful Role of Users
The expression ‘take-make-waste’ is gaining ground, frequently used in calls to shift to circular economy by both business and policymakers such as the World Resource Institute [88], the World Economic Forum [89], the Ellen MacArthur Foundation [5], the European Commission [90] and the UN Global Compact [91]. This widespread expression is a shorthand for a linear description of the value chain in just a few broad phases. The implicit response is to ‘take’ the material ‘waste’ into a circular production system. In reality, of course, the fashion industry is a complex global network with many steps along which value creation can take place, where environmental harms can accrue — and where different actors play powerful roles in shaping what material resources become available and where, when and in what forms.
The industry makes increasingly ambitious statements about sustainable circularity, for example, closing the loop to keep materials ‘at their highest value during use and re-enter the economy afterwards, never ending up as waste’ [5]. The responses are too often framed only in terms of material flows and improved textile and fibre production. They mostly emphasise technical issues needed to be overcome such as various aspects on recycling of waste [72, 92] and innovations related to textile fibres [43, 63]. Due to the material focus, these approaches miss to address what kinds of social structures are needed for a sustainable circularity of a system.
There is no doubt that today’s fashion system is driving planet-scale changes. Three key factors drive the industry’s increase in planetary environmental pressures. First, the production of fashion textiles has burgeoned as markets and industrialised economic development become globalised. The bigger the industry grows, the greater the demand for Earth’s natural resources and the release of polluting emissions. Sandin et al. [93] have shown that three-quarters of climate impact from clothing in Sweden comes from the production phase. Secondly, the speed of consumption has accelerated, as consumers worldwide buy more clothes, at lower prices, and use their clothes for a shorter time before replacing them with new clothes [94, 95]. Finally, fashion has a systemic lock-in to material leakages at every step in the life cycle of a garment. For example, part from material loss throughout production and recycling [96,97,98], a larger proportion of clothes is seen as almost disposable — worn for a season or even a day, then discarded or never worn before being discarded [24, 99, 100].
The phrase ‘take-make-waste’ reflects just two of these three factors: production and material leakage and loss. The key domain of consumption and the role of the consumer is very often missing in discussions of circular economy [101, 102]. The definition of ‘consumption’ refers to things being used up, but there are no users in the mainstream take-make-waste approach. What is taken and made is then somehow wasted without ever being used. A ‘take-make-waste’ perspective presents and thus reinforces a depersonalised view of a world. With a depersonalised approach, the industry’s responses are predominantly focused on materials and technological innovation, such as novel fibres, and innovative ways to capture chemical pollution, offset emissions and collect waste materials (the focus of the environmental initiatives in Table 1).
Nevertheless, sustainable circularity is also constrained by fashion users’ everyday decisions on what clothes to buy, use and dispose. Neither the actual material inputs nor the environmental harms caused by fashion are readily perceivable by consumers and are often not acknowledged by fashion brands themselves [99]. Fashion users, the social and cultural worlds they are part of and the nestedness of the material and non-material parts of their choices all play a vital role in controlling the ‘return flow’ of usable materials to the system. Yet very few sustainable fashion initiatives focus on fashion users, and none of the keystone actors assessed by Hileman et al. [13] collaborates with user-focused initiatives.
Normalising an approach that misses out users and the using of stuff has implications both for the diagnosis of the sustainability challenges of the fashion and textiles industry and the design of responses. The ‘take-make-waste’ approach fundamentally reflects and enacts a disconnect between what the industry does, the environmental conditions it engenders and the users’ environmental awareness. As a result, despite being readily communicated and appealing, it becomes problematic when trying to express how the fashion system really can respond to its social and environmental harms. Societies tend to respond to ecological changes when the state of the environment degrades to the point that it creates negative social impacts. Fashion businesses respond to pressure from their customers, reflected in the industry’s high ranking of consumer preferences as a strategic business risk [4]. Even where the industry’s impacts are evident, the capacity for fashion users, companies and policymakers alike to respond sustainably is hindered by the difficulty of expressing the links between global environmental changes and the garments in an individual person’s wardrobe.
Expanding the shorthand expression to ‘take-make-use-waste’ helps to integrate an adaptive social-ecological system perspective. This potentially helps to communicate a systemic understanding of the links between social drivers and environmental impacts at different phases in the value chain and in identifying options for resilient decisions towards sustainable circularity. Furthermore, it is helpful when linking the personal and the planet, which is at the heart of sustainable circularity — motivating action before impacts and harms become real, responding to business risk through mobilisation of new kinds of relationships with customers.
Performance Assessments of Circular Production Miss the Global Social-Ecological Context
A social-ecological systems perspective is needed because environmental impacts of production depend as much on societal decisions about natural resource use as on the biophysical aspects of natural resource supply. But, even here the industry frames the environmental problem as material, missing out its social contexts. The material, production-based focus of fashion businesses’ stated ambition to reduce contributions to environmental problems is apparent both in the initiatives they engage in and in the way they communicate with users. None of the initiatives in Table 1 proposes decreasing environmental harm by challenging social drivers, such as altering social activities for reduced material use at all scales.
Tools, metrics and tests for ecological impacts, such as life cycle and footprint assessments, give a partial perspective for business responses. Companies use life cycle analysis methods to obtain relative measures of environmental impact and improvement when alternative materials, products or processes are developed, but this information cannot readily be aggregated or compared beyond a narrow set of alternatives. In addition, the business sector often uses quantified amounts of materials taken at one place to offset elsewhere by compensatory payments, as if social and ecological diversity did not matter for system behaviour. But societies, cultures and ecosystems change over time, and demands for fashion are constantly changing. Applying rigid quantifications without attention to this complex changing context is a factor in erosion of resilience [103].
Framing questions narrowly in terms of changes in environmental conditions, disconnected from the social activities driving them and the impacts they cause [104], leads to misplaced responses. The industry makes statements on responses to planetary harms but fails to assess key elements relevant from a planetary social-ecological perspective. For instance, Sandin et al. [19] show that life cycle analysis of textiles does not assess impacts on biodiversity from large-scale monocultures; land use change and freshwater use do not properly represent the vast diversity in social practices and ecological contexts, and chemical pollution assessment disregards ‘chemical cocktails’, impacts of feedstock production for plastics and potential effects of chemicals and fibres released along the value chain. In addition, comparisons from alternative LCIA-informed fibre choices are treated as if different environmental impacts cancel each other out. Textile fibres have diverse societal impacts and affect the environment through multiple processes and feedbacks. Much more data is therefore needed to inform actionable sustainable circularity assessments.
Resilient responses need to accommodate the cross-scale dynamics of the system and be able to persist and evolve with social and ecological changes. Sharing futuristic visions about social wellbeing, closed-loop material flows and global change mitigation may play a role in mobilising paradigmatic change for the industry. However, it remains at the level of rhetoric unless it becomes possible to assess if efforts ‘add up’ towards sustainable circularity. At present, although we see signs that some businesses are beginning to mobilise towards sustainable circularity, this is impossible without comprehensive and comparable data and in the absence of an absolute baseline [105].