Is sustainability a fad? Numbers speak for themselves.
Every time a brand commits to offsetting its carbon emissions, or reducing water consumption, or waste generation, it needs to explain why it matters. It's at that moment that the brand needs to emphasize why what it does, why it should matter to us. That's when some of the industry's most chilling and oft-repeated facts emerge: the fashion industry produces and sells between 80 and 150 billion garments a year worldwide; almost three-fifths of all these clothes end up in landfill each year; and between 8 and 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from the fashion industry. It doesn't take much more than that to realise that these figures are indeed alarming, although there is something odd about them: the range of garment production is really wide, the amount of garments discarded varies greatly depending on it, and the two existing estimates for greenhouse gas emissions vary between [...]
