Sustainable Fashion and Textiles

Design Journeys

Kate Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317935209
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Praise for the previous edition:

"[A] fascinating book." John Thackara, Doors of Perception

"Provides the foundations for a radical new perspective." Ethical Pulse

"At last a book that dispels the idea that fashion is only interested in trend-driven fluff: not only does it have a brain, but it could be a sustainable one." Lucy Siegle, Crafts Magazine

Fully revised and updated, the second edition of Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys continues to define the field of design in fashion and textiles. Arranged in two sections, the first four chapters represent key stages of the lifecycle: material cultivation/extraction, production, use and disposal. The remaining four chapters explore design approaches for altering the scale and nature of consumption, including service design, localism, speed and user involvement. While each chapter is complete in and of itself, their real value comes from what they represent together: innovative ways of thinking about textiles and garments based on sustainability values and an interconnected approach to design.

Including a new preface, updated content and a new conclusion reflecting and critiquing developments in the field, as well as discussing future developments, the second edition promises to provide further impetus for future change, sealing Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys as the must-buy book for fashion and textiles professionals and students interested in sustainability.

PART 1 — SUSTAINABLE FASHION AND TEXTILE PRODUCTS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315857930-2

Chapter 1 Material Diversity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315857930-3

Materials play an emphatic role in our current understanding of the ways in which fashion and textiles can contribute towards sustainability. They are, more often than not, our starting point for change and also a valuable commodity for farmer, designer, manufacturing industry, consumer and recycler which works to reinforce their central role. Indeed materials have been a focal point to both recent waves of interest in sustainability issues in fashion and textiles. In the first, in the early 1990s, natural and recycled fibres dominated trade shows’, trend forecasters’ and industry journalists’ views on sustainability. In the second, which started in the mid part of the 2000s – and continues today – organic, Fair Trade and rapidly renewable fibres continue to lead populist ideas about sustainability innovation, with many companies basing their collections on choice of ‘alternative’ materials. The fact that materials seem to dominate our ideas about environmental and social responsibility is perhaps not surprising as, after all, the fashion and textile industry’s product is material ‘stuff’ – fibre, fabric, textile product and garment. For all of these reasons this chapter, which investigates the sustainability issues associated with textile materials, is the first in this book. Its aim is to quench the thirst for information about resource consumption, energy use, pollution potential and social impact of textile fibres, providing an information-rich resource that can support design choices. But this chapter also has a broader and deeper goal, to frame knowledge about fibres in a way that promotes a change in perspective: to challenge us to think beyond materials and to link a fibre with its lifecycle, a material with a user, and an industry with the ecological and cultural systems that support it.

In this chapter, the sustainability impacts of producing textile fibres are linked to the ecosystem-inspired idea of diversity. The fusion of fashion and textiles with ideas and terminology cribbed directly from nature appears throughout this book. The purpose is to use ecosystem properties and dynamics – like diversity – to help give direction and an overarching sustainability perspective to the many small design and production decisions that are made on a daily basis, and the hope is that we can then begin to design textile products and production systems that are as sustainable as the ecosystems they are modelled on. This chapter uses the idea of materials diversity to guide and promote the long-term health, resilience and effectiveness of the fashion and textile industry. Diversity is, as the saying goes, about ‘not putting all our eggs in one basket’. It avoids agricultural, manufacturing and fashion monocultures and its sustainability benefits flow from sharing ideas, spreading risk and decentralizing production to maximize long-term environmental, economic and sociocultural effectiveness, resilience and stability of the sector as a whole.

Diversity of materials and ideas is hard to find in today’s fashion and textile industry. It is dominated by a large volume of similar, ready-made products in a limited range of fibre types. Indeed in 2010 cotton and polyester together accounted for almost 85 per cent of world fibre production;¹ a percentage of the total that is increasing year-on-year.² The implications of the dominance of material choices by two fibres is to concentrate impacts in specific agricultural or manufacturing sectors, to increase ecological risk, to make the sector less resilient to changing global conditions in both business and the environment, and to reduce consumer choice. Yet a sustainability-driven strategy of materials diversity does not advocate zero production of the big two fibres – far from it – but rather as a perspective it works to broaden our fibre-related outlook and make visible alternative, and often unseen, impacts of concentrating our fibre opportunities on so few source materials, ecosystems and supply chains. A strategy of materials diversity aims to temper these fibres’ market dominance so that alternative, more resource-efficient and culturally responsive fibres can begin to flourish. Replacing some conventional cotton production, for example, with alternatives such as organic or low-chemical cotton, flax, hemp and lyocell could bring benefits by reducing pesticides and water use. Likewise a shift away from polyester to renewable and biodegradable fibres such as wool and those made from corn starch could also bring benefits, reducing our dependency on petrochemical products including oil. The result would be the cultivation, processing and promotion of a series of ‘minority’ fibres that, when taken together, amount to a majority. What is more, this majority has the potential to not only serve our material needs with reduced resource consumption, but it could also lead to more varied and locally sensitive agriculture, more regional fibres, more local jobs, and more healthy and socially robust environments. Ideas of diversity rightly reflect the complexity of the relationship between fashion, textiles and sustainability. They underscore the importance of recognizing that no one fibre, regardless of whether it is organic, fairly traded or recycled, can single-handedly transform the practices of a polluting and resource-intensive industry into a more sustainable one. Indeed a focus on materials alone is itself never likely to achieve this.

In sustainability, there is no such thing as a single-frame approach. Issues dealt with in single frames will, almost by definition, lead to unwanted and unforeseen effects elsewhere. To avoid these effects we have to be aware about the impacts of our fibre choices on the ecological, economic and social systems of which these materials are a part – and more tangibly on whole interrelated product lifecycles, which include cultivation, production, manufacturing, distribution, consumer laundering, reuse and final disposal. Broadening our field of vision to the whole helps us ‘scope’ those areas and lifecycle phases that are particularly high impact and identify key changes that need to be made. For some textile products, like frequently laundered clothes for example, these key changes are linked to improved laundry practices (see Chapter 3). For other textile products, like furnishings, where the production phase is the dominant source of impact, most benefit is brought by making products last longer by, for example, using design strategies that improve both physical and emotional durability (see Chapter 7). This does not mean that choice of fibre is unimportant – on the contrary it is central to what a textile or garment is – only that it is one amid many interconnected factors influencing overall product sustainability.

With one eye firmly fixed on the bigger picture, on lifecycle impacts and a goal of increasing materials diversity through our fibre choices, this chapter reviews the environmental and social impacts of fibre cultivation and extraction. The background to understanding the many and varied impacts of this first phase of the lifecycle is introduced, as well as a short description of the current market for textiles. The review describes some of the more ‘promising’ fibres that are being produced. To contextualize why some are more promising than others requires us to also review the conventional ones, which is where the fibre-by-fibre analysis begins. The information contained in this chapter is by its very nature detailed and in some cases technical. It can be read from start to finish or dipped in and out of, but its purpose is the same regardless of how it is engaged with – to provide a knowledge base about fibres from which we can begin to explore the whole system potential and direction of sustainability in the fashion and textile sector.

The market in textiles

The demand for textile fibre worldwide is increasing. Two fibres dominate this expanding market: cotton and polyester (see Table 1.1). Demand for polyester has doubled over the last 15 years – and has now overtaken cotton as the most produced textile material. While volumes of natural fibre production have remained fairly constant for several years, cotton fibre production has recently been on the increase along with volumes of cellulosic fibre. Also increasing is clothing’s share of the total trade in fibre: figures from a recent European Commission study⁴ reveal that individuals in Europe consume almost twice as many clothing products by weight as household textiles and combined these add up to 19.1 kg per citizen per year. Across both clothing and household textiles cotton and polyester are the most common fibres; making up 59 per cent by weight of clothing purchases (43 per cent cotton, 16 per cent polyester) and 56 per cent by weight of household textile products (28 per cent each cotton and polyester).

Table 1.1 World fibre production in 2010 (Million tons)³

	World fibre production
Natural fibres
Cotton	25.10
Wool	1.12
Silk	0.14
Total	26.36
Manufactured fibres
Cellulosics	3.24
Synthetics
Polyester	36.46
Nylon	3.86
Acrylic	1.98
Others	0.71
Total synthetics	43.01
Total	46.25
TOTAL	72.61

Background to sustainability impacts

Surveys repeatedly show that there has been – and indeed continues to be – tremendous confusion over the sustainability impacts of cultivating and extracting textile materials. Synthetic fibres are commonly seen as ‘bad’ and natural fibres as ‘good’. This preconception is influenced by a complex set of factors including raw material renewability, biodegradability and stereotyped associations made with chemicals, factories and pollution. Certainly while there is no dispute that producing synthetic fibres impacts on people and the environment, natural fibre cultivation and processing also causes substantial impact. Cultivating 1 kg of cotton for example, draws on as much as 3800 litres of water.⁵ In comparison, producing 1 kg of polyester uses little water, approximately 17 litres per kg of fibre.⁶ Polyester manufacture does, however, consume almost twice the energy needed to make the same amount of cotton. Thus, the key sustainability challenges in fibre production are different for different materials. The process of recording and assessing impacts involves looking at resources consumed (energy, water, chemicals and land) and waste and emissions produced (to air, water and land). The areas of greatest impact in this one lifecycle phase are:The relative importance of these impacts also have to be assessed against a constantly evolving base of scientific research and set of social and ethical concerns. For example, around five years ago carbon emissions held a prominent place in the sustainability debate in the UK and this led to a rise in interest in carbon-neutral fibres (i.e. plant-based fibres which absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during their natural growth cycle as they release on harvesting) like lyocell. Today,...