Why is fashion still not sustainable?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Making designer fashion more sustainable has been a cause célèbre for decades, so why hasn’t it happened yet? At the close of London Fashion Week, and just before the beginning of Paris, Tamasin Ford has been looking into why the industry hasn’t made the changes it needs. Kevin Bailey of the VF Corporation, one of the largest apparel and footwear retailers, says the industry has made great strides, while Roger Lee, of TAL apparel in Hong Kong, says a vague standards system for what counts as “sustainable” makes further progress difficult. But Christina Dean, founder of the Redress sustainable fashion awards as well as the upcycled fashion brand, the R-Collective, says companies could have already done a lot more to use re- and up-cycled materials in their new lines.
(Picture credit: Getty Creative)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Every second the equivalent of a truckload of clothes is either landfilled or incinerated. It's 2020. How is it that the fashion industry still hasn't got its act together? |
| 0:19.4 | The ugly reality is there is a large percentage of the fashion industry that has yet |
| 0:23.7 | to do absolutely anything. |
| 0:26.1 | And these are the people that are working under the carpet. |
| 0:28.6 | No one really knows about them. |
| 0:29.7 | I'm talking, you know, perhaps Asian brands that you've never even heard of, who are not |
| 0:34.0 | on anybody's radar. |
| 0:35.3 | So whose fault is it? |
| 0:36.8 | The manufacturers, the brands, |
| 0:38.9 | or us as consumers. The brands need to embrace and say I want to use recycled materials in my |
| 0:46.8 | products. And I think part of the reason is that brands and consumers are not demanding that |
| 0:51.1 | at this point. That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:56.4 | You may have started to think about your carbon footprint every time you fly, |
| 1:02.0 | but do you think about it when you buy new clothes? |
| 1:05.8 | The fashion industry accounts for about 10% of global carbon emissions. |
| 1:12.9 | That's according to the United Nations. |
| 1:19.0 | In fact, it sucks up more energy than both aviation and shipping combined. |
| 1:24.9 | Like every single cotton shirt, let's say, right, it's going to cost you 2,700 liter of water, one shirt in cotton. Do you know how much water that is? It's for every |
| 1:31.5 | adult to drink for two and a half year. That's a snippet from this year's London Fashion Week |
| 1:36.7 | that closed on Tuesday. Sustainable fashion is talked about a lot. Sustainable designers like |
| 1:43.2 | Patrick McDowell |
| 1:44.4 | showcased in London this year. |
... |
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