How to Make the Fashion Industry go Eco

The Fashion We Love Comes With A Pricetag

Today's post comes all the way from Shanghai, China where theSquirrelz.com is helping close the waste loop in the fashion industry. They share with us a post about eco-conscious fashion design. Thank you, theSquirrelz

Photographer: Levi Brown/trunkarchive.com

There are few industries in the world today with more passion and more creativity than the fashion industry. Whether we're looking at the small independent designers or the behemoth-sized brands, there's constant change and ingenuity that goes into creating the clothes and accessories we chose to wear every day. But there's a problem of ethics that's been brewing inside the industry for decades.

There's a price to getting the textured feel we love and the colors we adore in our wearables. The textile industry in China (the world's largest production country) alone processes around 42 million tons of textile yearly.The production of all this textile creates billions of tons of soot and creates 2.5 billion tons of wastewater per year. With nearly 40% of the United States garments being imported from China, it's clear that there's not one specific country to blame - all countries need to change the environmental cost of fashion. But where do you begin?

Source: gettyimages.com

The Steps Towards A Zero-Waste Industry 

Statistics like the ones above make one thing crystal clear: if the creation of our clothes has to produce waste, we need to be able to count on the factories to be as frugal as possible with their production. Sadly, in the day and age of 'fast fashion', this is simply not the case. So what can we do? While a zero-waste fashion industry seems unlikely (there's a reason there's currently only one brand that claims zero-waste production), there are far more practical actions both the industry and its consumers can take.

Leigh Mapledoram, program manager for textiles at Wrap thinks the long-term solution lies in the longevity of our clothes. 

“If the average life of clothes could be extended by just nine months it could reduce carbon, water and waste footprints by 20-30%.” - Leigh Mapledoram

Others believe that the key to a more sustainable industry is a major shift towards ethical fashion, a term that still suffers from having an overly dull and green image, incapable of being high fashion. The forays of well-known brands into sustainability and upcycling have mostly been nothing more than promotional one-offs and small scale endeavors. Rarely has there been a systematic change, a radical shift, in the production line of big brands. While some are making a sincere effort, the fact is that fast fashion is an unsustainable volume business that strains the planet.

The simplest way to take a step towards a more sustainable industry, waste reduction, and ethical production is, however, often overlooked. To see where the majority of the waste lies, we have to go back to where all these brands have their products made: factories. What we find there is that in the textile industry alone, millions of tons of high-quality materials are discarded and destroyed (not to mention the billions of tons of material wasted across other industries).

Source: waviness.wordpress.com

A single wrong, mis-dyed color or a minute size mistake can send entire batches of product to the landfill or incinerator. If it's not made to the specs of their contractor, it is useless to the factories. But that does not mean it's useless to designers! If we want to make a low-effort, high-impact change in the industry, this is it. 

Unused And Unloved Does Not Mean Useless

Factories create, endlessly. But not everything they create is used. Imagine the leftovers and unused materials a small-time designer is left with at the end of a project. Now imagine a large scale brand. Now imagine the perpetual creation process of factories. Trimmings, defectives, overstock and abandoned orders are stocked indefinitely in warehouses. All these factories create on demand, and neither want to or are able to find an outlet for these materials. Instead they destroy their production: often high-quality materials that are perfect for designers to work with. You need only a bit of creativity to create with the materials others see no purpose for.

For instance, inventive designers at the upcycle marketplace theSquirrelz.com use left-over and unused materials to create brand new products with. Eco-fashion and green products that don't look crafty, but instead are exciting, innovative and (most importantly) sustainably designed.

High fashion made from unused materials isn't out of the question. Just take a look at the yearly Ecochic Design Awards, which turns upcycling into high fashion art. 10 eco-conscious designers show off their creations: inspiring and inventive outfits, created through upcycling waste materials. None of them would look out of place at a fashion show and, in fact, few would notice their eco-roots.

Photographer: Tim Wong/redress.com.hk

And in that, we see the baggage that the term eco and ethical fashion carries with it. Perhaps the key to waste reduction in the fashion industry isn't about making 'green fashion' a more acceptable term. Perhaps the key is to simply make all fashion 'green fashion'. Instead of turning textile waste into fashion, we can prevent the waste from becoming waste in the first place.

To achieve that, we need to make changes at the start of the production line.

Designing Eco-conscious With Overstock Materials

Almost every town in the world is host to the occasional craft swap or exchange where small-scale designers can source new eco-conscious material, knowing that this material would otherwise go to waste. Until now, the high-quantity, high-quality factory 'waste' material has been unreachable for brands and designers who can integrate these eco-conscious materials into their designs. After all, there's no such thing as a 'wrong color' or 'wrong size' when you're using those materials as a base to design with.

One of the key lessons learned from the 2015 EcoChic Design Awards is that designers find inspiration in restrictions. They turn the creation process on its head by designing with the materials available to them, instead of the materials they'd want. So next time you're in a crafting mood, give your creation an eco-friendly boost by sourcing materials that would otherwise go to waste. If you look in the right place, you can find material that's as high-quality as what you find in the shops, but with the added benefit of being eco-conscious.

theSquirrelz.com is opening the doors of factory warehouses full of overstock, and allowing designers worldwide to benefit from high-quality, low-cost materials that, with each purchase, helps save our environment.

An eco-materials wholesaler that doesn't restrict the quantity you need, whether you're a crafter or brand. Imagine an industry where we use every misprint, every wrongly dyed shirt and every off-size piece of textile. An industry aware that one man's waste is another man's treasure.