The main sources used by Morgan and Birtwhistle were Birtwistle, G & Moore, C.M; Domina, T & Koch, K; Mintel (2007); Keynote Global Waste Management (2007) and Waste Aware Scotland. Everything in the article is based on evidence, research and surveys.
The article questions the ‘fast fashion’ trend (which now accounts for one fifth of the total UK clothing market) that has occurred over the past five or six years and talks about how this is contributing to the 23% increase in textile waste.
The main points are based on research into where people shop, how much they like to spend, how long garments are kept and where these garments are usually disposed. It also encourages us to find ways to make fashion more sustainable and suggests that the media could play a big role in spreading the word about textile waste.
Research has shown that young consumers are the most concerned with fashion trends and that most of these people would rather have several cheaper items than one expensive one. The stigma has been removed from buying from ‘value retailers’ and companies now have different styles coming to shops every two weeks for people who want something different to wear as often as possible.
However, this trend has a bad effect on the environment and needs to be changed. Morgan and Birtwistle talk about sustainable consumption, which is defined as;
‘Consumption that supports the ability of the current and future generations to meet their material and other needs, without causing irreversible damage to the environment or loss of function in natural systems’
They use Government research in their article to show the attitudes of consumers towards fashion, the environment and recycling. This research came up with several main points: A minority of people decide what is going to be fashionable; 18% of people are very influenced by celebrities and the media; many people shop two or three times a week; many people feel alienated by the fast pace of fashion; over half of the people surveyed buy fortnightly; only one in four regularly recycle; people put expensive clothes to the charity shop when they are throwing them away and cheap items in the bin.
Environmental problems have increased in recent years and so has general interest in recycling. Even though in fashion, people are concerned about ethical working conditions in their factories, but there is not much awareness of the problem of textile waste.
To increase awareness about recycling, Waste Aware Scotland came up with the ‘Three r’s’ strategy: ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ to educate consumers. The majority of textiles thrown away are recyclable and it has been shown that convenience is key when it comes to actually doing the recycling.
The conclusions drawn from this article are that young people are unaware of the problem of textile waste and that there is a lack of media coverage about textile sustainability. Though this study did not cover what would make consumers increase recycling, participants in the government research stated that they would change their recycling habits if they knew more about the problem.
‘Sustainable fashion and textiles’ by Kate Fletcher is a book full of technical information about fibres and textile sustainability. It is also a book of inspiring ideas and ways in which we can improve the way we make our clothes and textiles.
At the moment cotton and polyester dominate the textile market and the most popular, polyester, has doubled in demand over the past fifteen years. There is a lot of general confusion about sustainability: natural fibres are seen as good and synthetic as bad. Fletcher tells us that for 1kg of cotton eight thousand litres of water is needed, where as with polyester, little or no water is required. The issue of sustainability is clearly more complicated than we think it is.
To record the sustainability of materials it is important to look at the resources they consume (energy, water, chemicals, land) as well as what they emit (to air, water and land).
Fletcher goes through different types of materials and discusses their good and bad points, then offers alternatives. For example, cotton. She tells us that it is associated with negative changes in water balance and that machine picked cotton has far more impurities than hand picked cotton. The alternatives she offers are: organically grown cotton, low chemical cotton (GM), hand picked cotton, rain fed cotton or substitute fibres such as hemp or flax.
We are also given the example of ‘peace’ or ‘vegetarian’ silk, which is both ethical and environmentally friendly. Silk worms are allowed to grow in open forests with no hazardous chemicals and the chrysalises are collected after the moth has emerged naturally.
Fletcher also goes on to talk about recycling. Recycled fibre uses less energy when in production as well as less resources and chemicals. Small scale businesses are working in this area to try to make better quality recycled textiles. For example, Annie Sherburne’s recycled London textile yarns:
She covers the point, however, that reusing and recycling (sometimes known as eco-efficiency) is not the best solution:
‘Eco-efficiency is an outwardly admirable, even noble concept, but it is not a strategy for success over the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, merely slowing it down with moral proscriptions and punitive measures. It presents little more than an illusion of change.’
- William McDonough, "Cradle to Cradle" (2002)
Fletcher highlights that there is massive potential in other areas, such as service design, to counter the negative effects of consumption. Products could be rented for periods of time until the novelty had worn off, and then swapped for a new item.
There is also massive potential in modular textiles and wearable electronics. Garments are in development that could be bought with an electronic interface that allowed the wearer to download pictures and colours to their outfit, many outfits in one.
This is a very useful book for finding out what is good and what is bad for our environment, what we need to change, and for inspiration for future pieces of work.
I think these two pieces of writing work well together to give an understanding of the problem of textile waste and how we could go about becoming more eco-friendly with what we wear and how we dispose of it.
The article by Louise Morgan and Grete Birtwistle is about consumer behaviour, showing how we buy, when we buy and how long we keep items for. This article was full of evidence and surveys to back up every point and was finding out about textile waste on a social level. One of the main points was that there is a lack of media coverage on the topic of sustainable textiles, and that the media could be used easily to spread the word since nearly 20% of people surveyed were very influenced by celebrities and the media. I think to continue this research it would be a good idea to look into why the media haven’t covered this like they have covered other environmental problems.
Kate Fletchers book looks into sustainable fashion in a more technical way, following on from the process of buying to show what has to happen for the fabric for our clothes to be made and the effect these processes are having on our planet. She offers scientific evidence about the garments we buy at such a fast pace and tries to offer alternatives to popular damaging fabrics. The part of the book about wearable electronics really interests me, during our first year trip to London we went to see Hussein Chalayan’s collection and his use of electronics and light in his pieces was really exciting.
Although recycling came up in both of these pieces of work (from passing on clothes through charity shops to actually destroying and rebuilding the fabric) it has become apparent that sustainability is far more complicated than recycling and watching how much we buy. The quote Fletcher used from ‘Cradle to Cradle’ points out that this problem needs to be tackled on a deeper level, with how clothes are made in the first place.
In Fletchers book, sustainability is about finding new materials and innovative ways of creating outfits instead of recycling and reusing what we already have. In Morgan and Birtwistles article sustainability is about making these items work in society. Together they cover the social and technical aspects of sustainable fashion.
I think to find more out about this topic it would be a good idea to speak to people who are working in this field, as well as speaking to and surveying consumers about their knowledge about textile waste.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fletcher, Kate, 2008, Sustainable fashion & textiles, London, Earthscan
Morgan, Louise R; Birtwistle, Grete, 2009, ‘An investigation of young consumers’ disposal habits’, International Journal of Consumer Studies, vol. 33, no. 2 pp. 190-198
