Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast.

We're the show that takes a look at the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim

Halford.

This week we'll look at an intriguing claim about contraception.

But first we're doing something a little unusual.

We're going to play you an interview from a show broadcast in the UK called Anti-Social,

made by producers formerly of the More or Less team.

We think it's an excellent piece of fact-checking on the topic of fast fashion, which we want

to bring to a wider audience.

There are two claims.

The first is that after the oil sector, fashion is the second most polluting industry.

The second claim is that fashion accounts for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions.

So where did these claims come from and how reliable are they?

The presenter of Anti-Social, Adam Fleming interviews Alden Wicker, a sustainable fashion

journalist who's investigated these numbers for her blog, E.C.O.C.

Here's Alden Wicker.

The first one that it's the second most polluting essentially came from nowhere.

We've never really quite figured out where it came from, but it sounds really good.

So it proliferated, and despite the best efforts of multiple people and myself included,

people still continue to use it.

And the second one, it's always cited back to the United Nations.

And so at some point, somebody wrote on one of their pages or two of their pages that

...