Do you really understand sustainable fashion?

On November 18, 2022, the Environmental Protection and Resource Conservation Promotion Committee of the China Textile Industry Federation and the Beijing Representative Office of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation will hold the "Circular Release and Exchange Conference of the Denim Industry" in Shanghai, China, to jointly promote the resource recycling industry system. Before that, Magneto has also released several special articles focusing on sustainable design, but today, we want to talk about sustainable fashion itself.In fact, in recent years, not only in the fashion industry, more and more consumers have begun to pay attention to the topic of sustainability. According to the survey, the search volume of "sustainable fashion" on the Internet in 2019 has increased more than three times compared with 2016. However, when we open social media, we find that the discussion of sustainable fashion is more from the concept and design level, and there are many misunderstandings about the concept of sustainable fashion.

In 2022, the R.I.S.E. Sustainable Fashion Innovation Platform and the Avenue Climate Change Promotion Center (C Team) jointly released the first edition of the Sustainable Action Guide for Fashion Industry, which provides a very comprehensive analysis of sustainable fashion. Today, let's combine this "Sustainable Action Guide for Fashion Industry" to see what knowledge points of sustainable fashion are not widely known.In 2006, the International Fashion Trend Research Center said that "fast and fashionable" will become the development trend of the clothing industry in the next decade. In the next decade or so, as a product of the four social trends of globalization, democratization, youth and networking, fast fashion has provided the common people with a direct channel to connect with the fashion trend at a very affordable price.However, with the emergence of fast fashion and the continuous decline of clothing prices, people began to have more and more clothes that are not exquisite but relatively cheap. Once the fashion fades, these clothes will lose their value and be abandoned by consumers. Globally, although some of the waste clothes have been donated and recycled, many of them are still buried or burned. According to the statistics of the Allen MacArthur Foundation, about 12% of the fibers produced by the clothing industry each year are discarded in the production process, 73% are eventually discarded in the landfill or burned, and less than 1% of the products are recycled into new clothing.

In the Sustainable Action Guide for Fashion Industry, there is a clearer definition of the meaning of sustainable fashion: the meaning and reference of "sustainable fashion" are all-inclusive, covering not only the impact on the environment and ecology, but also the welfare of labor and animals in the manufacturing process and regional development. It is closely related to products, production and manufacturing processes, activities and actors (decision-makers, brands, consumers). It not only focuses on fashion products (textiles, clothing, bags, shoes, accessories, etc.), but also focuses on the joint participation of multiple parties in the whole value chain of fashion industry, including the understanding and support of consumers for the consumption of sustainable fashion products. In general, sustainable fashion mainly refers to the process of promoting the fashion industry to reduce resource consumption, environmental degradation and ecological pollution in the value chain process and product life cycle by comprehensively considering environmental, social, economic and cultural factors, so as to protect the ecological environment and improve social equity.