“Contains recycled polyester”. If you’ve been out updating your wardrobe recently, you may have come across a similar formulation. Maybe even written in green letters on an FSC-certified pap tag. And then must the blouse, blazer or trousers be a sustainable choice? The answer is more complicated than you get the impression of in the shop. Because most likely it doesn’t say that the recycled polyester often originates from plastic bottles, which instead of being turned into new bottles again and again, now end up in the landfill, when the clothes are no longer used. The cardboard sign also does not tell about microplastics or how much energy, water and chemicals it requires to recycle the material. In other words, it is not easy to be a consumer if you want to buy ‘sustainable fashion’. The fashion industry is said to be one of the world’s most polluting industries: Production emits more than the global aviation and shipping industry combined. Today, we only wear our clothes seven times on average, because fast fashion is so cheap and of poor quality. Every second, a truckload of clothes is therefore dumped in landfills around the world, and today only one percent is recycled into new textiles. The list goes on. It’s just not a good advertising text when you have to sell a lot of clothes. At the same time, the global industry has so far been very little regulated. That is why there are particularly many examples of greenwashing in the fashion industry. A report found in 2021 that 59 percent of green claims from European and British clothing brands are misleading. H&M is a top scorer, i.a. because their so-called Conscious Collection consists of large quantities of synthetic fibres, which are made of oil. But now something is finally starting to happen. H&M has removed their ‘Conscious choice’ category, after the consumer authority in Holland determined last year that it is greenwashing. In the UK, the competition authorities are investigating ASOS and Boohoo due to vague claims about sustainability. At home, Zalando was recently reported to the Consumer Ombudsman for branding goods as sustainable with a range of home-made certifications. At the same time, the legislators are finally moving to do something about the fashion industry’s enormous pollution, when the industry is not moving fast enough. Last year, the EU finally came up with a long-awaited and ambitious textile strategy, and in the US, among other things, The Fashion Act. They are predicted to be able to change not only what brands must write on the clothing labels, but also production and design for longer durability. They are about everything from fines for greenwashing, digital “product passports”, so that the materials in the clothes can be traced, and that the clothing companies must pay for the waste management of the millions of tonnes of clothes that end up in landfills every year. So far, however, many are only legislative proposals, which must first be discussed and revised before they can come into force. France has chosen not to wait for that, so from this year large companies have to inform consumers about the content of harmful chemicals and microplastics in each piece of clothing, how it is repaired and recycled, traceability of the materials etc. Smaller companies, which sell clothes, shoes and textiles must follow suit within the next two years. Critics rightly ask whether an industry with such complex value chains even has enough control over data to be able to tell consumers the story of the clothing’s overall environmental calculation. And whether the customer in the store can relate to the t-shirt’s imprint on the planet. But with the new legislation, reliable documentation is now unavoidable. At the same time, journalists and other watchdogs can more easily hold particularly fast fashion brands to account for the biggest problem: the 100 billion pieces of clothing that are produced each year. Because no, as global consumption looks like right now, you are not doing anything good for the planet when you buy a new t-shirt. Regardless of whether it is made from organic cotton or recycled polyester.
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Analysis: In France, you can now trace your t-shirt’s harmful chemicals and microplastics
