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Environmental groups are calling on the fashion industry to reevaluate its relationship with fossil fuels, mainly by committing to an equitable phase-out of petroleum-based materials. But synthetic fibres are just the beginning. What would it take for fashion to quit fossil fuels altogether?
A campaign called Fossil Fuel Fashion, launched in New York during Climate Week earlier this month by groups including Stand.earth, the Changing Markets Foundation and Plastic Soup Foundation, is behind the most recent rallies for fashion to eliminate fossil fuels from the materials prevalent in apparel and accessories. It also calls on fashion to commit to ambitious climate targets, and to openly support systemic legislative action. All three demands are goals that environmentalists widely agree are priorities the industry must address if it is to operate within planetary boundaries or align with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
They also underscore just how tightly woven the fashion industry is with the ubiquity and artificially low cost of fossil fuels, and the countless products created from them.
“This idea of a fossil fuel-free fashion industry is so interesting, because it really is no less than a complete transformation of the industry,” says Rachel Kitchin, Stand.earth’s corporate climate campaigner. “There are solutions that are very available — but in order for them to have the impact we need, it’s going to require a complete mindset shift from the industry.”
The campaign sits within a larger call, spearheaded by the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, for the world to stop expanding the use of fossil fuels — because despite the growing conversation about climate change and emissions reductions, says Harjeet Singh, global partnerships director for the initiative, there has been far too little attention to fossil fuels as the culprit.
“What we have been talking about over the last 30 years is, ‘how do we reduce emissions?’ — and not, ‘how do we look at the source of the problem?’ Unless we talk about the source, we will not be able to deal with [the problem]. That’s why we started this campaign for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty,” he says. “The whole world is looking at sectors that are most polluting — automobiles, agriculture, heavy industries like steel and cement. What has not happened in the normal discourse, in the UN when we talk about sectors, fashion doesn’t appear as a big sector. We are bringing our demand for a fossil fuels treaty closer to the work that [groups like Stand.earth and Eco-Age] have been doing to say the fashion industry must commit to phase out of fossil fuels. [Fashion must] call for a fossil fuels treaty.”
Fashion has a clear and direct connection to oil, gas and coal through both its energy supply and its materials portfolio, with petroleum-based polyester being the industry’s most widely used fibre. However, those are not the only places where fashion is dependent on fossil fuels, the largest contributor “by far” to climate change, according to the United Nations. From the fertilisers used to grow cotton and cattle feed to the boilers used to dye fabrics and the dyes themselves, to the aeroplanes and shipping vessels used to transport clothes from one country to another and the plastics, inks and other petroleum-based materials used to package it all, there is no aspect of apparel manufacturing today that is not facilitated — or enabled entirely — by fossil fuel consumption. While shifting away from synthetic fibres would be a welcome step for many environmentalists, it’s hardly enough to bring the industry into line.
“Even if you’re wearing natural fibres, your clothes are still made with fossil fuels,” says Kitchin. Whether it’s cotton or cashmere, wool or leather, most of fashion’s agricultural supply depends on nitrogen-based fertilisers to grow the fibre crop — or to grow the corn and other crops that are then fed to the fibre-producing animals — and on pesticides that are not only made from petroleum-based ingredients, but are also distributed to the farm and then applied to the land by petroleum-operated vehicles and equipment. The raw materials are processed and then spun into fibres by machines also operating on oil or coal — and so on.
“For every material, there’s fossil fuels embedded all the way down to the start. It’s everywhere. You could go deep on cotton, on leather, on wool, on any material and see that fossil fuels are kind of everywhere,” says Michael Sadowski, sustainability consultant for the World Resources Institute and author of an Apparel Impact Institute report published in June, ‘Taking Stock of Progress Against the Roadmap to Net Zero’.
Where alternatives exist, and where they don’t
In many places, there are alternatives that fashion can easily turn to in order to reduce or eliminate fossil fuels — accelerating the transition to renewable energy for electricity, eliminating coal for thermal heating used in wet processing and sourcing organic, regeneratively grown natural fibres. For these, the main obstacle is not limited knowledge or technology, but a lack of willingness by brands and others to invest in the steps necessary to scale those solutions across the supply chain. Brands talk about renewable energy, but one-off solar projects are not going to decarbonise the supply chain at the level or speed that’s needed.
The bigger challenge, says Kitchin, is for the industry to recognise that the real problem is not about the step-by-step choices that make up the fashion supply chain today; it’s the way the system operates as a whole that has to change. “The fashion industry loves these Band-Aid solutions,” she says, but it’s clear those won’t cut it.
Even regenerative organic cotton, one of the most trusted efforts that fashion has embraced as it strives to be more sustainable, cannot solve the industry’s problems. “It’s a solution that we point to as being the most important thing brands can do to ensure their cotton sourcing is sustainable, because it has the power to rebuild soil health and improve biodiversity. But, a shift toward regenerative cotton is going to take a transformation of the cotton industry,” Kitchin says. Brands need to develop relationships with farmers, the soil and landscape will take years to improve, and the rest of the system has to change as well — for the cotton to maintain the same level of environmental integrity, for example, the spinning, dyeing, sewing and finishing processes all need to also be cleaned up. “That’s what I mean by transformation. There are solutions, but they need to be part of a system shift,” adds Kitchin.
More importantly, it also can’t solve the industry’s overproduction-overconsumption problem. “There is no world in which we can replace the volume of synthetics we’re using with cotton — even if it’s fully regenerative cotton. There’s just not enough arable land and water in the world to produce it all.”
What’s really needed, she says, is more radical, systems-wide change — to create a future “where brands are in real partnerships with suppliers, rather than this take-make-waste model”. It may sound like a long way off, but it’s important to remember that fashion hasn’t always operated the way it does today.
“The fashion industry’s already undergone a complete transformation in the last 40 [or so] years,” she says. “It’s been transformed from being comparatively local — where people used to take care of their clothes, inherit clothes — into being this throwaway culture. That is a transformation that’s happened incredibly quickly. It’s transformed our relationship with clothes. Now we need to transform it back.”
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