DKNY, Tom Ford and Reebok among companies to score 0% in Fashion Revolution report ranking top 250 firms
Almost a quarter of the world’s biggest fashion brands, such as Reebok, Tom Ford and DKNY, do not have a public plan for decarbonisation, a report has found.
The fashion industry can be highly polluting. In some casesforever chemicals have been found in the waters near factories. The industry is also a concerning source of waste, with fast fashion accused of encouraging overconsumption.
The What Fuels Fashion? report, published on Thursday, analyses and ranks 250 of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers – those with turnover of $400m (£313m) or more – based on public disclosure of their climate goals and actions.
Not suprising. With all those trends and temporary fads, all those clothes have to go somewhere.
It’s really not just the big brands, it’s the entire industry. Fast fashion isn’t restricted to high-end brands. It’s in every badly-made Walmart T-shirt you can wear for maybe a year before it falls apart. It’s all a mess. And making your own clothes doesn’t even help much because good luck getting well-made fabric you can afford. Plus, you’re probably not going to be able to make your own shoes even if you’re good with a sewing machine.
Cheap, well-made fabric is available at thrift stores in the form of linens. Curtains, tablecloths, and sheets are a great source of high-quality fabrics for cheap!
And we should definitely be buying more from thrift stores, but it still doesn’t solve problems for things like shoes. Eventually, they wear out. Thrift store ones fairly quickly much of the time. At least when we’re talking about practical shoes rather than fashionable ones.
Easy to forget that all of these colorful outfits need to be assembled from colored material. And colors have to come from dye. And dye has to come from somewhere. The chemical process for generating different kinds of dyes and inks carries an enormous ecological impact in the immediate surroundings of the factory. This is especially true in areas of the world with little to no environmental protections, where businesses like DOW Chemical, BASF, and Sinopec are unconstrained in how they dispose of their waste.
I get a funny feeling that the decarbonization plans of the other 75%+ are worthless or nearly worthless in terms of actually helping humanity in any significant way with the polycrisis at hand. The very existence of a worldwide brand of anything is nowhere near sustainable.
I’m still rocking good quality tees, coats, jackets, and pants from way back when I was a teenager. I’ve never understood the whole “even though I’ve got plenty to wear, I just NEED a whole new wardrobe!!!” Types.
