{"id":7575,"date":"2017-05-11T18:49:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T18:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.p4.greenpeace.org\/post\/copenhagen-fashion-summit-how-not-to-make-the-fashion-industry-more-sustainable\/"},"modified":"2019-11-06T09:49:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T08:49:01","slug":"copenhagen-fashion-summit-how-not-to-make-the-fashion-industry-more-sustainable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/story\/7575\/copenhagen-fashion-summit-how-not-to-make-the-fashion-industry-more-sustainable\/","title":{"rendered":"Copenhagen Fashion Summit: How NOT to make the fashion industry more sustainable"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, representatives from all the major brands – from fast fashion retailers like H&M, Asos and Zara, through to luxury labels like Burberry and Swarowski – are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss sustainability in the global fashion industry.<\/p>\n

The fashion industry is one of the most lucrative and destructive industries on earth. It generates \u20ac1.5 trillion every year and produces over a billion clothes every year. With global garment production set to\u00a0increase by 63% by 2030, this model is reaching its physical limit.<\/p>\n

This year’s\u00a0Copenhagen Fashion Summit<\/a> is focusing \u00a0on \u201ccircularity\u201d \u2013 an industry buzzword that promises relief to the problem of limited resources within one of the world\u2019s most resource intensive industries. In 2015, the fashion industry consumed nearly 80 billion cubic meters of fresh water, emitted over a million tonnes of CO2 and produced 92 million tonnes of waste. The Summit admits that the industry has a disastrous environmental impact and that we face \u201cincreasingly higher risk of destabilising the state of the planet, which would result in sudden and irreversible environmental changes\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"

Panelists at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, 10 May 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

While their focus on circularity sounds promising, it\u2019s simply not enough.<\/p>\n

Industry leaders rarely talk about the real solution: reducing the overall volume of production. All their talk about sustainable investing and innovative new materials and technologies comes under the assumption that the industry continues to grow. But unlimited growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The industry wants to place the responsibility on consumers to educate themselves and recycle their own clothes, while continuing to heavily market cheap fast fashion at us.<\/p>\n

Real change is not going to happen without investing in designs and strategies to extend the life of clothing and reduce the environmental impact of production at the design stage. Fashion brands need to redefine their marketing strategies and start involving customers in a new narrative where people buy less and clothes are more durable and repairable. We need to slow down.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Trash

On the weekend after Black Friday, which marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, Greenpeace Taipei launches a campaign in an effort to raise awareness about the effects of people\u2019s shopping habits.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s not enough to sell customers placebo solutions that ultimately leave shopping patterns untouched and guilt free. Even if we encourage people to recycle more, we have to remember that recycling is a resource intensive process<\/a> relying on chemicals and vast amounts of energy, with many unsolved problems making it far from commercially viable.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0already know\u00a0[PDF]<\/a>\u00a0that we own more clothes than we can wear. Shopping doesn\u2019t make us happy<\/a> in the long run. High volumes of fast fashion and rapidly changing trends aren\u2019t catering to our real needs.<\/p>\n

If the Fashion industry really wants to be \u201can engine for a global and sustainable development\u201d, it needs to think about how to shift the business model beyond the current paradigm of continuous economic growth. We hope that the fashion industry doesn\u2019t wait until 2030 to realise that.<\/p>\n

Chiara Campione is a Senior Corporate Strategist for Detox My Fashion<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, representatives from all the major brands – from fast fashion retailers like H&M, Asos and Zara, through to luxury labels like Burberry and Swarowski – are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss sustainability in the global fashion industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":7576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_planet4_optimize_post_is_variant":false,"_planet4_optimize_experiment_name":"","_planet4_optimize_variant_name":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"p4_og_title":"","p4_og_description":"","p4_og_image":"","p4_og_image_id":"","p4_seo_canonical_url":"","p4_campaign_name":"","p4_local_project":"","p4_basket_name":"","p4_department":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70,73],"tags":[67],"p4-page-type":[59],"class_list":["post-7575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature","category-social-and-economic-systems","tag-consumption","p4-page-type-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7575"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26090,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7575\/revisions\/26090"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7575"},{"taxonomy":"p4-page-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/p4-page-type?post=7575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}