The ingredients of net positive fashion

Fashion is a serious polluter, but a new report suggests that bringing down its climate impact will take more than adapting supply chains.

Why it matters

The Global Fashion Agenda Monitor 2022, based on in-depth consultations with more than 30 partner firms is a resource to help fashion professionals to accelerate their efforts in the last eight years before the deadline to hit the UN’s 1.5 degree pathway – though there is an increasing chance the world will need to move even faster.

Ultimately, brands will need to work out how to shift their business models to subsist of selling fewer, longer-lasting items.

What it covers

The report looks at five areas:

• Respectful and secure work environments
• Resource stewardship
• Smart material choices
• Better wage systems
• Circular systems

While the first three are advancing, it’s the final two that remain difficult sticking points.  

This makes sense: increasing disposability of items and globalised production processes have allowed aggressively profitable companies to emerge across the world.

According to the report, progress here will constitute both an internal and external education about what a sustainable company looks like.

Go deeper

“Proceeding on the industry’s current linear path, resource flows will become less dependable, and more value will be destroyed. Today, fashion brands are increasingly exploring circular business models and initiating processes of redesigning their product life cycles, though complexities around the linear model have slowed this transition,” the report explains.  

“The industry must move to a circular model which is characterised by three principles, as outlined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Eliminating waste and pollution, circulating products and materials and regenerating nature.”

Sourced from the GFA Monitor 2022, Sky News