No one knows exactly how many jackets, jeans, T-shirts and trainers are produced each year, which means no one knows how many garments remain unsold in warehouses, destined for landfills or destruction. Without this information, trying to reduce the fashion industry’s carbon footprint is a bit like solving a puzzle in the dark.
Available statistics show that between 80 and 150 billion garments are made annually and between 10% and 40% of them are not sold. This could amount to 8 to 60 billion surplus garments per year – an alarming disparity.
“Production volumes are a really important opportunity to bring fairness back into the conversation,” says Liz Ricketts, co-founder and executive director of the Or Foundation, an environmental justice charity based in Ghana. “It’s a data point that everyone can access. It’s about companies wanting to share it.”
Believing that transparency about production volumes is crucial in assessing and addressing the extent of fashion’s environmental problems, the Or Foundation launched the Speak Volumes campaign in November, which invites brands to reveal how many units they will produce in 2022 have made.
So far, 32 SMEs have participated. The biggest reveal came from British brand Lucy & Yak, which produced 760,951 units; the smallest was from the Scottish brand Mlambo, with only 100 pieces. It’s a far cry from the billions of garments thought to have been produced by fashion’s biggest players, none of which participated.
“The reason they don’t like to talk about how many products they have is because it’s the industry’s dirty secret,” said Francois Souchet, a circular economy and sustainability strategist. “There will likely be a huge public backlash once people understand how many products are not being sold.”
At the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, where the Or Foundation works to support the community that trades in the unwanted clothing of the Global North, approximately 40% of every bale of textiles ends up as waste. This figure has led to Ricketts asking brands to commit to a 40% reduction in new clothing production over five years, something that can only be achieved if production volumes are visible. “It just feels like a bad thing,” Ricketts said. “Why did you make so many extra things?”
There are several reasons why brands produce more than they sell: manufacturers insisting on minimum order quantities; an increasingly rapid retail cycle, fueled by frequent deliveries of new products; an inability to read the market. While there are a number of new technologies to combat this problem, including AI to predict consumer demand and custom modeling, none show signs of being widely adopted.
Brands produce demand in the same way they overproduce clothing
Liz Ricketts, The Or Foundation
Overproduction is also symptomatic of an archaic production system that encourages volume: the more T-shirts ordered, the cheaper the price for each garment. This is because the biggest costs of producing fabrics and assembling clothes are in the setup; the longer the assembly line runs, the more efficient it is. “Plus, brands are afraid of missing out on a sale, so they always order too much rather than too little,” says Souchet.
The exorbitant waste in the sector is the result of the way disposable clothing is viewed in rich countries. It is also symbolic of how well supply chains are hidden from and misunderstood by consumers.
“There’s a lot of human work that goes into our clothes, from the picking, spinning and weaving of cotton to the garment workers and how often they don’t see their children because of the hours they work,” said Christina Dean, the founder of the anti-waste charity Redress. “For those pieces to be thrown away in such an indifferent manner signifies how out of tune we are with our fellow human beings in this world.”
A recent survey by the Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) shows that 78% of brands have targets to reduce overproduction. But according to Holly Syrett, GFA’s impact programs and sustainability director, respondents cited a lack of clarity about what overproduction means as a barrier to tackling it.
“We define overproduction in a fairly simple way,” she says. “When a company buys or produces more stock than it can sell, it is left with inventory that is then sold at a discount, resold to other parties or possibly destroyed. The feedback we received was that our definition is not specific enough.”
But excess inventory isn’t the only problem, says Ricketts: “We try to use the language of ‘oversupply’ more than ‘overproduction’ because we’re talking about the marketing mechanisms used to push the oversupply onto the consumer. Brands produce demand in the same way they overproduce clothing.” This demand is created by relentless social media marketing, targeted digital advertising, email campaigns, and a seemingly endless cycle of discounts and promotions.
The other side of this coin is of course overconsumption. It’s hard to say without knowing how many products go unsold, but it’s clear that clothing items do Are are responsible for the majority of the industry’s carbon footprint. “If we conservatively say 60% to 70% of garments are sold, that’s where the majority of emissions are happening,” says Souchet.
This is the hard truth that is almost always avoided at industry summits and corporate objectives. According to sustainability think tank Hot or Cool Institute, the fashion industry will need to at least halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2018 levels if it wants to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. levels. While other business models such as rental, resale and repair are often cited, Hot or Cool says that reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius in the G20 high-income countries – including Britain, the US, France and Australia – will reduce of consumption by 60% will require.
On the current trajectory, industry emissions will double over the next decade. To curb production and consumption rates, it is clear that forthcoming European legislation on extended producer responsibility schemes cannot come soon enough.
“Fast and radical changes in production and legislation are critical,” said Lewis Akenji, director of Hot or Cool. “Expanding producer responsibility [EPR] for fashion brands in the post-use phase is a promising path… but it should not be a burden-shifting mechanism.”
The proposed EPR schemes propose a financial levy of just €0.06 per item, to be paid by the producer, and a responsibility to contribute to the management of a product’s end-of-life through initiatives such as recycling from textiles to textiles, upcycling, downcycling, rental, resale and repair.
Ricketts and Souchet believe that any levy would have to be much higher to lead to a meaningful reduction. Because overproduction makes sense from an economic perspective, Souchet says, the sum would have to be “significant” to change the industry. Ricketts says it is crucial that EPR legislation ensures that the funds raised reach communities like those in Ghana, which bear the burden of textile waste.
“How do we think we can realize the transition to circularity by continuing to pump out this endless oversupply of products? That is not possible,” she adds. “The policy must take production volumes into account. No matter how much innovation or money brands pump into solutions [such as textile recycling]we won’t be successful if we don’t slow down.”