How Leading Apparel Brands Can Make a Positive Environmental Impact
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Considering the environmental consequences of the holiday shopping season, we’ve compiled six suggestions for how apparel brands and manufacturers can achieve a positive environmental impact.
Considering the environmental consequences of the holiday shopping season, we’ve compiled six suggestions for how apparel brands and manufacturers can achieve a positive environmental impact.
From the sourcing of textiles, the dyes and manufacturing processes, to packaging and transport, there are a lot of carbon emissions, harmful chemicals and wastewater pollution involved in the production of apparel. The global revenue in the apparel market was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 0.3 trillion U.S. dollars (+16.76 percent), as per Statista. Living in a culture of fast fashion and free returns only exacerbates these habits, encouraging people to overbuy and then send items back that don’t suit them or don’t fit.
A study done by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reveals that for the global population of 8 billion, around 19 pieces of clothing per person are manufactured yearly. Yet, the lesser-known aspect is the emissions generated throughout the lifecycle of clothing. In the current era, there is a trend of purchasing more clothes while wearing them less frequently.
Management consultant McKinsey’s Fashion on Climate report highlights that approximately 20 per cent of these emissions is produced from the way we wash, dry, and maintain our clothes. Furthermore, research published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin found that for an average wash load of 6 kg, over 700,000 fibres could be released into our waterways per wash, leading to the widespread distribution of synthetic textile microfibers even in the deepest ocean realms.
Consumers seeking to repair or alter their clothes face challenges, reflected in the vast amounts of clothing discarded in landfills. This presents an opportunity for brands to offer affordable repair services and design collections prioritizing repairability and circularity. Repairing clothes or buying second-hand is now trendy, shedding past stigmas. Over the past year, significant investments have flowed into start-ups in this space, with more brands embracing repair services.
6 Sustainability Tips
It is more important than ever for brands and their supply chains to make more sustainable choices. So here are a few suggestions for this holiday season:
- Agree on standardized sizes – Fashion brands should collaborate to agree on a standard set of measurements for garments that enable people to buy one size with confidence. This will reduce overbuying and returns and make for a better customer experience.
- Track chemical usage – Use a platform, such as CleanChain, to track your chemical inventory across your supply chain. If harmful chemicals are being used, you can quickly identify these and seek more sustainable alternatives.
- Repurpose unsold stock – Destroying stock might be the cheapest way to protect your brand and any unsold items, but it’s far from sustainable. Instead, think about how you might donate it, sell it to another brand, repurpose it through a particular supplier or collaborate with others to find alternative ways to use the stock. Fashion tends to come back around, so it may fly off the shelves in the future—a little creative marketing may be all that is required.
- Use virtual fitting rooms – Utilize technology like AR and VR to provide virtual changing rooms for your customers. This way customers can try on the clothes and styles before buying, saving future returns and the need to wash so many garments.
- Use more sustainable fibers and fabrics – From fungi leather to bamboo, synthetic spider silk and pineapple leaf fiber, some very exciting, more environmentally friendly alternatives are available to brands and their supply chains. Most brands are keenly aware of all this but don’t put as many resources into using sustainable alternatives as they could.
- Think critically about packaging – Does each item really need to be individually wrapped? Does the box need to be that big? Find innovative packaging suppliers that have conducted a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of alternatives to identify the types of materials and designs with the lowest environmental impact. Little changes in packaging can make a big difference in the long run, especially with regard to the weight and therefore the fuel used during transportation, ultimately saving your company money.
Whatever your plans for 2025, consider integrating some or all of these sustainability measures. Failure to actively improve one’s sustainability poses a great risk to a brand’s reputation and is a threat to suppliers who may lose business if they can’t keep up with the wave of transformation that is already starting to take hold.
Like to learn more about how CleanChain can help you track your chemical inventory across your supply chain? Contact cleanchaininfo@adec-innovations.com
