Are voluntary schemes enough to reduce fast fashion waste and impacts?

As we know, the global fashion industry is a massive contributor to harmful emissions, environmental pollution, and landfill rates. Increased awareness of the fashion industry’s damaging environmental impact has led to many consumers questioning their spending habits, and brands and manufacturers stepping up their commitment to real change and sustainability.

This change is to be welcomed, and governments have long argued that voluntary schemes to reduce fast fashion impacts will be more effective long-term than legal interventions. But is this really enough?

Have voluntary schemes worked for consumers?

Consumer behaviour is one of the most significant barriers to creating a more sustainable fashion supply chain. Fast fashion’s powerful marketing, low cost, and social media influence for constantly new outfits make fast fashion extremely hard to resist. This is the point, of course, from a business point of view. But personal behaviour change from consumers is crucial– and fashion will only be able to become genuinely sustainable if consumers buy fewer clothes and keep them for longer.

To encourage this, various initiatives have had some success, including:

• Brands such as H&M promoting recycling by offering vouchers to spend in-store in exchange for donated clothes
• Awareness of ‘make and mend’ approaches
• Work by brands such as Patagonia to encourage a move towards ‘buy less, buy used’ to increase the ‘life’ of garments in the supply chain while reducing the new resources needed
• Fashion brands highlighting their green commitments and creating eco collections to encourage consumer spending (and awareness) on more sustainable solutions

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Is new technology the only way forward to solve sustainability in fashion?

We’re constantly reporting on fashion sustainability and initiatives to reverse the ecological impacts of the industry permanently. But the impact of fast fashion on global sustainability still has the power to shock. As the Ellen McArthur foundation reports, by 2050, there will be 150 million tonnes of waste fashion and clothing entering landfill if nothing changes.

So what, realistically, is the solution? While changes in consumer behaviour will essential, they’ll also be the hardest to achieve. Technology advances offer important opportunities for increasing sustainability- but will they be the most realistic way to affect change?

Sustainability is multifaceted

Currently, attempts to make fashion more sustainable are significant but struggle to make a lasting impact. There are many ways brands and consumers are working to be more sustainable. From in-store recycling schemes, sustainability is highlighted as a marketing priority, and signs of consumer purchasing habits are changing to a more potentially sustainable future. But this change is not happening quickly enough.

The number of factors involved in the problem of fashion sustainability make it particularly difficult to tackle. The reasons for this are myriad; the psychological need for consumers to buy more and more is hard to resist, brands face the dichotomy of choosing to promote profit over sustainability, and the sheer size of the task needed to make fashion actively sustainable is daunting. There’s also the massive impact of social media and its influencers on encouraging constant purchases by consumers. <<Read More>>