Pattern cutting waste. Toxic chemicals and textile dyes. Unsafe working conditions. The fashion industry has a lot of sustainability niggles.
With the average Australian buying 56 new garments a year and a general distrust of second-hand fashion, behavioural change is frustratingly slow. As Australians source more and more of their clothes from overseas countries, clothing retailers have little control about the environmental and social sustainability profiles of the garments they sell.
Dr Lisa Lake, director of the Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion and Textiles at the University of Technology, Sydney, would know. She has been tracking the sustainable evolution for a decade since authoring the book about Sustainability with style about her personal journey into environmentalism while working in marketing at the Green Building Council of Australia.
Of all the fashion industry’s sustainability challenges, waste is front and centre, Lake tells The Fifth Estate in an interview. Every time a garment is made, it is cut using a larger piece of material. Everything that isn’t within the pattern is wasted. Total production waste could be up to 25 per cent of total material use, according to the Australian Fashion Council’s Clothing Data Report.
To this end, the Centre of Excellence, a partnership between UTS and the neighbouring Ultimo TAFE, has acquired an industrial knitting machine capable of 3D knitting, which creates the garment from scratch without the need for a pattern and yielding significant materials savings
Other sustainability challenges will be less easy to solve, in large part because the Australian fashion industry has offshored such a large part of its value chain.
“We grow all of this wonderful cotton and then we ship it overseas for spinning into textiles,” Lake says. With the amount of offshore manufacturing, fashion brands have less control over the environmental footprint of their factories – from renewable energy and water use and the use of dyes and chemicals, to working conditions of the labour force.
Lake and her colleagues at the centre have developed 30 short courses in sustainable fashion and textiles specifically for experienced professionals.
Ultimately, the goal is to establish a micro-factory, complete with spinning machines and digital looms capable of creating woven materials. TAFE is supplying its digital pattern cutting machine. “Our vision for the centre is to have all that capability in one place, so the industry and students can learn the basics of sustainable fashion production and so we can carry out R&D on sustainable materials.”
Shifting consumer preferences is the key to reforming an industry that lives and dies on effective brand marketing. Lake says consumers have been more switched on to social sustainability issues such as modern slavery and general working conditions, particularly since the 2012 fire in the Tazreen Fashion factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Concern about environmental issues has been secondary. Improvement on this front will only come if brands can demonstrate to consumers that they are taking action.
How to make fashion more sustainable…Dr Lisa Lake’s top five:
- Regulate
Part of the reason why brands have been so active in tackling modern slavery stems from the Modern Slavery Act (2018), Dr Lake says. From an environmental perspective, Australia has more lax regulations than the US. The US has placed a ban on cotton originating from the Uighur region of China, forcing brands to completely trace back where they source cotton from in their supply chains.
- Traceability
“If I had a magic wand, I would just have every fashion brand in the world start their supply chain from scratch today, because that’s the problem is you’ve got these existing supply chains that you haven’t ever really queried the starting point,” Lake says.
- Go mono
One of the difficulties in recycling pre-worn fabrics is the difficulty of separating out different materials in blends such as cotton/Lycra and cotton/polyester. Recycling fabrics would be a lot more straightforward if manufacturers use “mono” materials such as 100 per cent cotton.
“At the end of its useful life, when hopefully that garment has been worn and worn and worn by you, and whoever else ‘till it’s really done, it can be recycled back into can either be recycled back into fibres, or if it’s a natural fibre, it’s it can biodegrade, naturally without leaching any chemicals back in the soil,” Lake says. “And similarly, if it is of a garment that has used synthetics, if it’s 100 per cent, synthetic, then you can recycle that back into new fibre and material. It’s not really happening right now.”
In an ideal world, manufacturers would move away from synthetics such as polyester and Lycra, but Lake acknowledges that they are still the most optimal fabrics for waterproofing and high-performance activewear where moisture-wicking is required.
- Zero waste
Using digital tools in pattern cutting or moving away from patterns altogether by adopting 3D garment making, are key to a lower-waste future in the fashion industry, Lake says.
- Make it locally
“We should bring back some spinning and manufacturing to Australia, but we need to have the equipment and the knowledge. Because we’ve lost so much manufacturing capability. We can’t produce even though we grow this beautifully high-quality cotton in Australia, and we have incredible wool grown here and in New Zealand, and all of it gets sent overseas to be turned into fabric.
“Imagine how quickly we could reduce transport emissions if we manufactured in-country. An in places where you can rely on renewable energy, you also have greater control on the energy emissions related to the production of fabrics.”
Why is it all so hard?
With few publicly listed companies, the cottage nature of the Australian fashion industry means there is less transparency and accountability compared to other countries that are home to powerful global brands. And because firms are operating on extremely tight margins, there is sometimes a reluctance to try sustainable innovations if they come at a cost to the bottom line, Lake says.
Until consumer preferences shift substantially away from always having to buy new and towards alternative circular models such as using less, second hand purchases and recycling used garments, environmental wins in the battle for sustainability in Australian fashion are going to be hard-won.
Initiatives such as the Australian Fashion Council’s Product Stewardship Scheme, where brands publicly pledge their journeys towards circularity to eliminate clothing waste in Australia by 2030 are a promising sign. But such schemes are unlikely to get the momentum they require for real and lasting change until they are mandated, Lake believes.