This piece was researched and written by Alden Wicker and originally appeared on EcoCult, a resource for all things sustainable and eco-friendly, based in NYC. Syndicated with permission.
Fashion Isn’t the 2nd Most Polluting Industry
Oh, journalistic hubris. I had it bad after I published on Racked what I hoped would be the death blow to the oft-cited “fact” that “fashion is the second most polluting industry in the planet.” I found no basis for this fact, no research, no compilation of data.
Once I shared this with the world, I expected everyone to read my story, and stop using the fact. But of course, Fashion Revolution happened, and the fact continued to pop up in every article and panel, to my deep frustration.
The problem is, I had no fact to replace it with. All I could say was that we had no idea how bad fashion is for the planet, and we desperately needed research to ascertain that figure.
Well, the universe (or rather, the Danes) has provided. The Global Fashion Agenda, which is currently putting on the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, teamed up with the Boston Consulting Group to do some serious number crunching and put out the Pulse of the Fashion Industry Report.
It’s a deep, deep dive into the fashion industry’s sustainability metrics, and makes the strong business case for better resource management by fashion companies – innovate or die, as it were.
The report came up with its numbers for carbon emissions, chemical usage, and water usage by building on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Index, which provides a framework for brands to measure their own supply chain impact. That data was extrapolated out through expert interviews and weighting by company size and price positioning.
The number they came up with, a “Pulse” of 32/100, will be remeasured each year and serve to measure the industry over time, which is great. But it’s currently meaningless to consumers and advocates without context. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to the report frequently to harvest from its hundreds of data points. But for now, I would like to answer a very specific question:
Is fashion the second most polluting industry globally, as everyone always says?
The report says that the fashion industry is responsible for the emission of 1,715 million tons of CO2 in 2015, about 5.4% of the 32.1 billion tons of global carbon emissions in 2015. (I’m going to caveat this next part to say that for global industry numbers, I’m working off of global greenhouse gas emissions, not carbon emissions.
So we need to assume that the proportion of other gases – methane and nitrous oxide – is the same in fashion as it is for other industries, which it should be, because fashion is made up of these other industries).
TLDR; My calculations put fashion, as an industry, as less polluting than electricity and heat (24.9%), agriculture (13.8%), road transportation (10.5%), and oil and gas production (6.4%), and equal to livestock (5.4%).
That makes fashion tied for the 5th most polluting industry in the world.
It’s the sixth, if you break electricity and heat production into its commercial and residential sectors. That is still really high, as one industry, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
What is bizarre about doing this sort of analysis is that the fashion industry involves all the industries I just mentioned. Electricity (often from dirty sources like coal and diesel generators) powers the garment factories. Cotton is an agricultural product.
A small portion of clothing’s journey is done by road transportation. Polyester is made from plastic, which is a petroleum product. Leather is a byproduct of livestock raised for food.
Which just reaffirms the power of fashion. If you could fix fashion’s supply chain and lower its emissions, you would be lowering the emissions of the four most polluting industries on the planet.
Fashion, could in fact, save the world…
