Natural alternatives
A recent report called Fossil Fashion takes synthetic fibres to task for having a substantially higher carbon footprint than alternatives from natural sources. It seems to have made a profound impression at fibre manufacturer Lenzing. Reading the report has led the group’s vice-president for the global textiles business, Florian Heubrandner, to draw three main conclusions.
The vice-president for the global textiles business at fibre manufacturing group Lenzing, Florian Heubrandner, has issued a call to arms to the whole of the fashion industry to redouble its efforts to secure “a carbon-free future”. He sees three principal sustainability trends impacting the fashion landscape in 2021. Of these, the first is “debunking myths and assuming responsibility”. Mr Heubrandner quotes a recent report that claims many consumers remain unaware that “cheap fibres like polyester” are found in over half of all textiles and account for 530 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year. He says brands must continue raising awareness and decreasing their reliance on “cheap synthetics”.
He explains: “Polyester is incredibly energy- exhaustive to produce, equating to six times the carbon emissions of cotton, according to the 2021 Fossil Fashion Report.” This report, whose full title is ‘Fossil Fashion: The Hidden Reliance of Fashion on Fossil Fuels’, was published in February by a cluster of campaign groups: Changing Markets Foundation, the Plastic Soup Foundation, the Clean Clothes Campaign, Zero Waste Alliance Ukraine, No Plastic in my Sea and WeMove.EU.
Emission submission
It is from here that the carbon emissions figure quoted by the Lenzing vice-president for the global textiles business comes. In turn, the report takes the figures from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which says in ‘A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future’, that CO2 emissions from synthetic clothing are six times higher than the emissions from clothes made from cotton. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation report is from 2017; it gives a figure of 530 million tonnes of CO2 for plastic-based fibres in comparison to 86 million tonnes for cotton. Figures for 2018 show that global fibre production that year was 107 million tonnes. Just over 62% was synthetic fibres, while cotton accounted for a little under 25%. The synthetic fibres, therefore, had 2.5 times the volume of cotton fibres, but six times the carbon emissions.
The Fossil Fashion report makes a clear connection between the popularity of polyester and its cheapness. It says: “In the US over 60 years, apparel has moved from costing 1.5 times the price of other items in the average consumer basket to costing less than half, strongly suggesting that fossil fuels are a fundamental lynchpin of fast fashion. This is not surprising considering that polyester is cheap, costing half as much per kilo as cotton.” Quoting figures from September 2020, it put polyester at around 85 cents per kilo and cotton at $1.89.
Prices send a message
Mr Heubrandner agrees and says that the rise of fast fashion is definitely linked to the widespread availability of “cut-price fossil-fuel-based fibres” such as polyester; this ongoing connection between fast fashion and high volumes of synthetic fibre is the second of the trends Mr Heubrandner has highlighted.
At the 2021 World Economic Forum (usually in Davos, but online this year), one speaker, Ken Webster, said he feared fashion companies, like most businesses, are still “fully embedded in a linear system” and he added that the linear economy is driven by cheap fossil fuels and by cheap labour. “There is an artificial cheapness when it comes to fossil fuels because the level of subsidy for fossil fuels is about $5 trillion per year,” said Mr Webster, who is director of the International Society for the Circular Economy (IS4CE), an independent international academic society set up in 2019. Before that, he was part of the team that set up the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. He pointed out that this put the value of fossil-fuel subsidies at more or less the same level as the gross domestic product (GDP) of Japan. The International Monetary Fund estimated post-tax fossil fuel subsidies at $5.2 trillion in 2017. Japan’s is the third-biggest economy in the world. Its GDP in 2019, according to The World Bank, was just over $5.25 trillion. No wonder that the fibres that derive from fossil fuels are cheaper than natural alternatives.
“Prices send a message,” Mr Webster said. “All the efforts to move to circularity are being undermined by this distorted market. We have to look hard at these system conditions or it will be very hard to make the degree of shift that policy-makers and everyone in business want to see.” He said he would like to see prices “telling the truth” because this would make the market more realistic.
‘A one-way ticket to landfill’
All of this appears to lend extra weight to Florian Heubrandner’s support of the Fossil Fashion report. Another aspect of it that he echoes is the small share that recycled polyester has of the overall polyester market and, within that, how little of the recycled polyester comes from used clothing rather than plastic bottles. The “recycling red herring” is the term the report uses to describe this.“With consumers having greater awareness of sustainability, brands have been quickly finding ways to uphold their eco-credentials through using recycled polyester in their clothing,” Mr Heubrandner explains. “Currently, almost all recycled polyester comes from recycled bottles, mostly in a closed-loop system. Yet, diverting bottles from a closed-loop system and turning them into polyester for clothing is actually a one-way ticket to landfill and a risk of perpetuating downcycling. Another concern is the risk of brands greenwashing their image by using materials such as bottles, fishing nets and ocean plastic to make their clothes. Garments made from plastic waste do not lower the plastics crisis or stop the flow of plastics into the environment.”Other reports presenting alternative views are also available, of course, and it can be hard for consumers to know which ones to pay most attention to. “There is an abundance of readily available information on the web,” Mr Heubrandner agrees. “Textile and fashion industry practitioners, brands and consumers are spoiled for choice. As a company that has been involved in the manufacturing of sustainable fibres for the textile and fashion industry for more than 80 years, we at Lenzing, have learned from experience that the key to empowering the industry and consumers to make informed choices is transparency.” He says a public commitment to global standards aids transparency.
What he refers to as conscious consumerism is having a great impact on many different aspects of life now and, inspired by this, he says the Austrian fibre manufacturer is working closely with industry counterparts and campaign groups to champion transparency through industry education within the supply chain, especially on raw material sourcing and sustainable production process assessments. Retailer education activities are also ongoing, providing brands and retailers with knowledge of what goes into making products and labelling that will help them explain this to consumers. There is also direct consumer education, conducted through sharing relevant information on raw material and products to help consumers make informed decisions.
Innovation drive
Moving on to the third of the major trends, he says innovation will drive the industry’s zero-carbon vision. Mr Heubrandner explains that an urgent need to rethink the fashion industry’s carbon output has arisen. This, in turn, has encouraged brands “to double down on efforts to innovate, increasing demand for alternatives to synthetics”. Not long ago, fossil fuel-derived synthetic fibres were the “alternatives”. These were the products that meant innovation and the future. Now we have important companies calling for alternatives to the alternatives. He points out that, as in other industries, innovation in the textile and fashion industry is ongoing. New fibre types come along and companies adopt new production processes with the aim of enhancing sustainability. At the same time, new technology from outside frequently comes into the industry and makes a difference. Blockchain, with its ability to help trace the origins of products, is a good current example.
Florian Heubrandner continues: “Synthetics are big in terms of volume. That’s why we need to increase supply and demand for natural alternatives and most importantly, develop true circularity solutions beyond polyester recycling. As brands and consumers become more aware of the negative impact we are having on the planet, the need for alternative materials and alternative ways to minimise impact will continue to grow.”
His view is that sustainable plant-based fibres, such as those Lenzing produces, could provide a good alternative in the years ahead because, he says, they offer comfort, durability and “sustain- ability guarantees” (please see the separate article on page 16 of this issue of WSA on manmade cellulosic fibres). He adds that innovation must also focus on the development of “ground-breaking circularity-minded processes” to reuse water and solvents during production. Some emissions remain unavoidable at present, he concludes, but he says he hopes to see a large-scale push away from “impactful production practices” in the years to come.
Conscious consumerism is having a great impact on many different aspects of life now, including textiles.
All Credits: Lenzing
