What's really the problem?
everyone is focused on the wrong things
I was reading an article on BoF recently titled Why Fashion Isn’t Making Climate Progress and What Needs to Change. What I appreciated was it called out how focused the industry, and even consumers, have been focused on elements of sustainability in apparel that won’t actually truly solve the core issues. This statistic really struck me: “raw materials account for less than 15 percent of the industry’s planet-warming emissions”. The article goes on to explain that it is not the fibers themselves, such as cotton, wool, silk, and linen, that are the real problems but actually what is done to these materials during the many processes and treatments while turning them into fabric. The amount of harmful dyes used, the bleaching, the chemical treatments, the laundering and more. So while some keep calling out recycling and circularity as major solutions, this is not the case as even this requires tremendous amounts of chemicals and energy.
I have not been able to stop thinking about this. It made me realize that the majority of people today do not even know how a fiber is turned into fabric in the most basic ways. This is likely a good place to start when trying to understand the broadstrokes of turning a material into yardage then used to make clothes with. To help, I did some basic sketches to illustrate the processes for cotton, wool, and silk:
