A Written Series: The Regeneration — A Guide For a New Generation of Shoppers & Brands to Act Responsibly

This was initially written as a book proposal. I have decided to take the content from the proposal and publish it as an ongoing series on Medium to help educate and inspire change.

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As an entrepreneur who launched a tech company in the fashion industry, CURIO, I spent years studying fashion, tech, and the startup world. When I began to increasingly come across the term ‘sustainability,’ it made me want to understand two things:

1. What does sustainability mean anyway? Brands were starting to use it as a marketing term but did anyone really even know what it meant?

2. What was happening in the fashion industry that made it so bad for the planet?

From watching documentaries to reading books, articles, and listening to podcasts, I did my due diligence. My team at CURIO (which pivoted from a tech marketplace to a discovery platform) and I have also conducted many interviews, talking to founders of fashion companies about their journey to launch and the path to sustainability. While I was already a fairly conscious consumer — I don’t eat meat and had started moving away from fast fashion — what I found floored me.

According to NASA, global climate change has already made a visible impact on the environment. From glaciers shrinking and ice breaking on rivers and lakes earlier to plant and animal ranges shifting and trees flowering sooner, scientists predictions due to global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea-level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

Even more recently, the 2020 fires in Australia — largely attributed to climate change — resulted in the death of an estimated one billion animals and released 400 million tons of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases responsible for global climate change. We’ve seen similar impacts in California. The August 2020 fires killed at least 32 people, destroyed over 8,400 structures, and forced about 100,000 people to evacuate their homes. There were about 17,000 firefighters battling nearly two dozen major fires across the state at the same time. The effects this has and will continue to have on our planet and our day-to-day lives will be seen in more and more ways.

The fashion industry has played a pretty big role in spurring many of these changes, I learned. Indeed, fashion is one of the world’s most polluting industries. Clothes are often made from oil-based materials or resource-intensive agricultural products like cotton, and manufacturing processes frequently involve harsh chemicals and large volumes of water. Millions of tons of clothes — 73% of the world’s clothing — end up in landfills every year. What’s more, unsold and used clothes — more than $200 billion worth — remain on shop floors and in warehouses globally, adding to growing piles of waste.

Despite the already staggering levels of waste, between 2000 and 2014, global clothing production doubled and the amount of products purchased each year by the average consumer increased by around 60% — much of which was tied to fast fashion. Apparel consumption is projected to rise another roughly 60% between 2017 and 2030 to reach 102 million tons — the equivalent of 500 billion T-shirts.

Even more heinously, thousands of human lives have been lost due to poor working conditions. In 2013, approximately 2,500 people were injured and 1,138 lost their lives in the Bangladesh Rana Plaza incident, where an eight-story factory building collapsed due to extremely poor building maintenance and horrible slave labor working conditions. It has become known as the deadliest garment industry accident in modern history.

Within three years of the Rana Plaza accident, the industry saw some of the largest garment disasters on global record, including the 2012 Ali Enterprises fire in Pakistan, the 2012 Tazreen Fashions fire in Bangladesh, and the 2015 Kentex factory fire in the Philippines that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,600 garment workers.

The only way we can halt the forward march of climate change is to start making changes ASAP. At the 2018 Waste to Wealth Summit, Prince Charles addresses this issue, saying: “We are the first generation to understand, in full and terrifying scientific detail, that we are testing our world to destruction. And we are the last to be able to do something about it. If we do not act, our children and grandchildren will not be able to sort out the mess — that’s the problem.”

But where do we even start? Embarking on this journey to understand sustainability in the fashion industry unearthed in me a deep sense of responsibility. But there was so much out there! How was I, a single individual, albeit a passionate entrepreneur, supposed to understand it all, or translate it simply for the world to also understand?

I thought of it like this: if I were to launch a brand tomorrow, what would I need to know about operating responsibly? Of course, by adding any sort of product to the market you are already ruling out your chances of true sustainability, as by doing so you’re contributing to the overload of products that exist, and that often end up in landfills. What does it mean then to do second best? To be a wholly responsible brand and to operate your business with responsibility in mind? How does that play out across the entire business, from design to production and distribution?

I made it my mission to find out, and what I’ve learned is that responsibility in fashion looks at everything from how you design your products to upcycling, recycling, transparency, traceability, emissions, ethical practices, materials, production quantities, water usage, packaging and more.

In this series, I break down what I’ve learned, with an aim to create a roadmap to help brands act responsibly and ethically, while also helping people (especially the conscious generation) understand what they can do to be part of this change.

Each article in this series will serve as a breakdown of one of the responsibility pillars under the larger sustainability umbrella in fashion. By focusing on each section, we’ll be able to easily digest the issue and have clear steps to making change.

In truth, issues of sustainability and responsibility are often complicated and nuanced, with both brands and consumers often not knowing where to even start. For this reason, the series will be presented in a way that makes this sometimes dense information easrily digestable with examples of brands that are making efforts toward responsible practices while also providing qualitative answers to the questions everyone has about sustainability.

The series will take a complicated subject and present it in a way that is appealing while educating, inspiring, and making it easy to understand. Operating responsibly doesn’t mean you must sacrifice style or design, and that will be demonstrated throughout this series, in both style and substance.

Additionally, I’ve gathered lists of organizations, events, consulting firms, digital platforms, and tools that brands will be able to reference. These will be incorporated in the text and also listed out separately.

Currently, the average of 250 global brands reviewed by Fashion Revolution’s annual Fashion Transparency Index scored 23% or less on transparency for social and environmental issues. Most fashion brands today don’t know where their materials are coming from and often turn a blind eye to the way they’re produced.

As many brands have grown and had bigger supply chains, they’ve also experienced more challenges in knowing where everything comes from. Oftentimes they rely on their manufacturing partners to supply materials, with little visibility on where fabrics are spun or where raw materials are produced. Finding more information can be costly and time-consuming, but not doing so leaves brands exposed. This series will help brands find solutions to these kinds of complexities.

The conversations around sustainability and climate change are increasingly weaving their way throughout the world’s industries, and fashion is no exception. As a global community, this topic became prevalent in 2015, when the United Nations launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, providing 17 Sustainable Development Goals for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.

Some of those goals include reducing poverty, providing clean water, clean energy, decent work, and economic growth, as well as innovation and responsible consumption –- topics we discuss throughout this series.

Climate issues and sustainability have also become a high priority matter for major global companies. In his 2020 annual letter to chief executives, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock (and with nearly $7 trillion in investments, the world’s largest asset manager), said the firm would begin to exit certain investments that “present a high sustainability-related risk….”

“With the impact of sustainability on investment returns increasing,” he continued, “we believe that sustainable investing is the strongest foundation for client portfolios going forward.”

Consumers are increasingly becoming more conscious, too. According to Pulse of the Fashion Industry, an annual assessment of the fashion industry’s environmental and social performance, more than 50% of consumers say they plan to switch brands in the future if another brand acts more environmentally and socially friendly than their preferred one.

Brands like Veja, Stella McCartney, Pangaia, Reformation, ASKET, Eileen Fisher, Noah, Patagonia, Nike, and Adidas have all been moving towards responsible practices across various aspects of their businesses. While no one brand is perfect, and in 2020 we saw many of them get called out for their lack of diversity and racism in the workplace, we are seeing changes happening and the steps brands like these are taking will be used as case studies throughout the series.

I believe that our biggest asset as brands and consumers is education. As a piece in Highsnobiety put it: “At a time when big luxury houses and fast-fashion businesses are treating innovations in sustainability as a competitive advantage to get ahead, the collaborative DNA of street culture has the power to educate the industry as a whole, and lead long-term financial, social, and environmental prosperity.” I believe this to be true beyond streetwear and for the industry as a whole.

The series will also help you identify which area of sustainability you care about most — people, product, or planet — followed by a breakdown of each of those responsibility pillars under the larger sustainability umbrella in fashion. Each article in this series will serve as a breakdown of one of the responsibility pillars. By focusing on each section, we’ll be able to easily digest the issue and have clear steps to making change.

I’ve examined all aspects of the industry and have understood why it’s difficult for existing brands to change, as well as what they and new brands can do to start making change where possible. Of course, not every brand can be 100% responsible on day one but they can certainly put metrics in place or launch with a handful of responsible practices and grow from there. While each section offers opportunities for brands to improve, they will also be educational for conscious consumers and outline ways that shoppers can make changes as well. This series aims to be an effective first step towards achieving responsibility and accountability for both brands and consumers.

I hope that my work and research can also make its way to local and national change by working with policymakers and organizations while collaborating with brands and consumers to use our combined power to improve climate conditions in this industry. I also hope this series can contribute to a much needed wider conversation around environmental impacts in fashion.