How fashion is forgetting about water
Name: Krishna Gokani |Week: Term 2, Week 5 |Theme: Fast Fashion & Sustainability
Water; it’s something we use every day, whether it be for a shower, to brush your teeth, to make coffee or tea, or simply just to drink, it’s easily accessible to a large proportion of the worldwide population. Water is at the heart of sustainable development and is key for socio-economic development, healthy ecosystems and human survival. It’s a finite and irreplaceable source, that if unmanaged, will run out. Despite such a large proportion of the population having access to clean water, there are still a huge amount of people who don’t, or at least, the water they have access to, is not clean. About 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, and only 3% of it is actually freshwater that can be used for human consumption, with two-thirds of that being frozen in glaciers and thus, unavailable. According to WWF, some 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to the water.
There are so many causes of Water Scarcity, the main ones being overuse of water and pollution, which in some cases go hand in hand. Water overuse is a massive issue that a lot of people are dealing with, and most of this overuse of water comes from industry, which in turn pollutes clean water. The main culprits are within the Fashion Industry. It takes 2,720 Litres of Water to make one t-shirt and 7600 litres to make a singular pair of jeans. To make things worse, in 2015 alone, the fashion industry consumed 79 billion cubic meters of water and that figure is expected to increase by 50% by 2030. The reason these require so much water is that they are made from Cotton, a crop that requires 20,000 litres of water to produce a single kilogram of cotton. It is estimated that 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution is caused just by the fashion industry, and viscose production is largely responsible for that. Viscose comes from plant-based fibres, and though this seems like a positive in the fashion industry, in truth production of viscose relies on chemicals which can cause a number of problems, and in some cases, death.
As much as I’d like the fashion industry to use ethical production, I know that it’s not an easy fix, and it’s going to take more than a day to entirely change the fashion industry to produce their products in a more environmentally friendly way. It’s a completely different production method which will not work with the factories as they stand, which would mean another factory would have to be built, which would perhaps cause more problems in the environment, and no clothing item is worth sacrificing clean water.
Despite this, there is one company that is producing their cotton in an ethical way! Plexus cotton is a cotton merchant which supplies cotton to a number of different brands and they produce their cotton in an environmentally friendly way. Plexus Cotton works with smallholder farms in Africa and the crops are rain-fed and their products are not artificially irrigated. They embroider, design and make the patterns themselves which means that they are able to control the processes and make sure they aren’t harmful! Have a look at their website below!!
