Applying the 80/20 Rule to Sustainable Fashion
We can drastically improve apparel sustainability in the short term by designing more valuable products, increasing technology in production, and cleaning up garment washing.
There are many initiatives in the apparel industry to improve sustainability, from using ethically-sourced fabrics, to repurposing end-of-life garments. The recipe for a truly sustainable apparel industry includes all of these initiatives, however, there are several approaches which can deliver a huge impact in the short term with minimal effort. Let’s have a quick look at three of these, and see how we can adopt them.
Design more valuable products
The more we consume, the more we make, the more we compound associated issues. Reducing consumption is the most effective approach to promote sustainability. Practically speaking though, the numbers need to make sense. Fashion businesses are unlikely to sacrifice profitability for ethics, so the only option is to get consumers to spend more while buying less. Brands can achieve this by creating higher-value, hyper-segmented products rather than scatter-gunning near-enough-is-good-enough garments on the cheap. This also increases the chances of up-cycling, further reducing consumption and garment waste in the long term.
A good example of this is Copenhagen-based Son of a Tailor, who sell custom-fitted t-shirts and polos using top-tier materials and workmanship. They have built a brand that resonates strongly with millennial male consumers, centred around the ideas of personalisation, quality, and supply-chain transparency. Their products are made in Europe, and on the swing tag of every garment, it’s even possible to see the name of the person who made it. This culminates in Son of a Tailor being able to charge a premium for what is essentially a commodity product; their customers happily spend more while buying less.
Increase technology in production
Garment production to this day is a very manual and inefficient process that is inherently unsustainable. On the cutting side, maximising fabric usage can only be achieved with intelligent nesting algorithms, certainly not with the judgment of a human being. Alas, there are many factories that still manually design lay-plans to this day. Production lines also lack flexibility and adaptability, requiring bulk orders to deliver economies of scale, perpetuating a culture of over-production, unsold inventory, and ultimately, waste. By digitising production lines, we’re able to maximise the line’s ability to adapt and thrive with smaller orders, unlocking the sustainability power of on-demand production.
A technology company pioneering production digitisation is TBTM2M. They’ve solved the problems of planning, operating, and managing an entire production line using a central computer and array of tablets. From automatically driving a cutting machine to instructing a line sewer exactly what process to complete, they can remove human inefficiencies that prevent production line adaptability. With more factories using their setup, on-demand production will become mainstream.
Clean up garment washing
Fabrics are by and large unethically reared, processed and produced. There is plenty of scope for improvement, however, it takes time for new material technologies to find their place in the apparel world. The lowest hanging fruit in the short term is addressing the harmful and wasteful process of washing garments in production. Garment washing in production is a necessary step to achieve the ‘worn-in’ aesthetic that’s prerequisite to garments like denim jeans and Oxford shirts. The quantity of water and chemicals (such as harmful chlorine bleach) that are required to support this process is stomach-churning. Bubble- or steam-based washing, and ozone bleaching can instead be used to achieve the same quality of finish with a 96% reduction in overall impact.
Denim mainstay Levi Strauss has invested heavily in cleaner garment washing technologies. Marketed as WaterLess, they’ve been able to reduce water in finishing by up to 96% for some styles. To date, they have saved over 172 million litres of water while producing more than 13 million pieces of apparel. By 2020, Levi’s aims to make 80% of its products using the WaterLess technology.
In summary, the journey to apparel industry sustainability is a long and multi-faceted challenge. There are however several areas that the industry can target today to drastically improve sustainability in the short term. These include designing higher-value hyper-segmented products, increasing technology in the production process, and embracing water- and chemical-sipping garment washing technologies.
