Great article on sustainable fabrics: https://daily.jstor.org/fashion-forward-three-revolutionary-fabrics-greening-industry/
In case you want to read an article on Fashion Fit Issues and Sustainability by someone else in class....
Those of you who know me know that I've been talking about garment fit for over twenty years. Back in the 1990's, when international trade and overseas apparel production was in its ascendance as manufacturers sought to capitalize on low labor costs overseas, fit really started to become an issue for consumers. Separated by an ocean and a continent or two, designers, patternmakers, and samplehands were no longer working side-by-side creating garments that would perfectly conform to, and therefore beautifully fit, the human body.
Photo by Shutterstock
Ma Earth is paying through its nose for the clothing we produce, according to a study that quantifies, for the first time,
the price we exact from the ecosystem for our clothing. Case in point? Factoring in the use of water, fertilizer, and
energy along the entire supply chain, a single cotton T-shirt can cost the planet more than 20 Danish kroner, or $3.40,
in financial terms. Extrapolated across the industry, clothing consumption in Denmark alone plunders the environment
of more than DKK 3 billion ($510 million) every year. This toll is much too high, says Kirsten Brosbøl, head of Denmark’s
Ministry of the Environment, which partnered with the IC Group, operator of brands like Tiger of Sweden and Peak
Performance, to commission the report.
from leather and zip manufacture, impacts the environment,” Brosbøl says in a statement. “Now we can see what this
actually costs, and even though all our clothes are produced abroad, we still have a responsibility. I call on the industry to
make things better and to use these accounts to reduce their environmental footprint.”
Although Denmark hosts several well-known brands that operate both domestically and abroad, garment manufacturing
within the country itself is limited. (Despite a number of cut-and-sew factories and finishing plants, it doesn’t farm cotton or
produce polyester or other textiles.) In fact, more than 80 percent of Danish apparel is imported as finished product, which
means that most of the industry’s impact stems from activity outside of the country, in places such as China, India, and Turkey.
“We in the clothing industry are well aware that we have some hefty environmental challenges,” says Morten Lehman, corporate
responsibility manager for IC Group. “These accounts provide IC Group with a tool to further qualify our work on sustainability
and to set specific targets for our sustainability efforts in our value chain.”
emissions with factories in China; emissions we have previously considered as a problem primarily arising from raw materials
production rather than at factories,” he says.
This isn’t the first time “natural capital accounting” has been used to calculate the impact of business activities on natural
resources and ecosystem services. Puma popularized the concept when it released its first Environment Profit & Loss Account in 2011.
FASHION FORWARD: HOW THREE REVOLUTIONARY FABRICS ARE GREENING THE INDUSTRY
If the holiday sales are tempting you to refresh your wardrobe, consider the environmental footprint of buying a new jacket and throwing away your old one. Today, about 80 billion new pieces of clothing are made each year—400 percent more than 20 years ago, while the world’s population only grew about 30 percent. That growth has a huge environmental cost. The Danish Fashion Institute named fashion “one of the most resource-intensive industries in the world, both in terms of natural resources and human resources.” Designer Eileen Fisher has called it “the second largest polluter in the world… second only to the oil industry,” and while that fact has been disputed, a 2010 research paper found that the industry is responsible for almost 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Moreover, once clothes have been made and worn for a short while, they’re thrown away. A new report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that cumulatively around the world a truckload of clothes gets dumped every second. The average American tosses about 82 pounds of textiles a year, much of which ends up in landfills or incinerated. Of the clothing that reaches second-hand stores like Goodwill—only 15 percent of all discards—some is recycled into shoddy (filling for cheap furniture) or upcycled into things like denim insulation, but most of it is shipped to poorer countries. However, they too have limits—African countries including South Africa and Nigeria recently banned Western castoffs, which have overwhelmed their markets, causing the decline of their local fashion business.
The fashion commerce clearly needs major alterations. But is it possible to retrofit a $1.2 trillion-dollar industry?
Replacing Old Fabrics With New Biopolymers
Two types of textiles—petroleum-made polyester and field-grown cotton, often woven together—have been the fashion industry’s darlings for decades. “Much of [what we wear now] is a blend of PET, a petroleum-based fiber, and cotton fiber,” says Ramani Narayan, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Michigan State University. But these fabrics have their issues. Cotton, which makes over 30 percent of our clothes’ yarns, is a natural material, but it’s a thirsty crop that siphons 3 percent of the fresh water, and accounts for almost 20 percent of pesticides and 25 percent of the insecticides used in agriculture worldwide, before it’s even picked. Processing cotton—knitting, weaving, and dyeing—also takes water and energy, yielding more pollution. The production of polyester, the demand for which has doubled in the last 15 years, is an energy intensive process that requires a lot of oil and generates harmful emissions, including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases, like hydrogen chloride, all of which contribute to respiratory disease. “Adding PET to a textile gives you better performance—it makes fabrics more moisture-resistant and gives them more washability,” says Narayan, but these textiles don’t break down naturally, and instead fill up our landfills and oceans. Polyester threads discarded from washing machines have recently been found in fish, including some species we eat. Unless PET threads are decoupled from cotton and recycled, they don’t decompose, but separating fibers is very difficult.
Clothes in the garbage in Novi Sad, Serbia. – iStock
That’s where biopolymers come in. Biopolymers are macromolecules—long chains of smaller molecular units strung together. These basic units can be amino acids, nucleotides, and monosaccharaides. The most common biopolymer is cellulose, which makes up one third of all plant material on earth. Cotton is 90 percent cellulose, but there are other, less polluting alternatives.
Biopolymers can be grown or harvested from other plants like kelp or from living organisms like bacteria or yeast, which produce biopolymers as part of their lifecycle. The resulting fibers can be woven into a variety of textiles akin to polyester, leather, or a cellulose-like yarn. To a certain extent, these materials can sequester carbon from the atmosphere, acting as wearable carbon sinks. And when they’re thrown away, these biopolymers will decompose. Just as a cotton t-shirt will break down in a compost heap after a few years, so will any biopolymer-based textile.
“Obviously it’s better to use plants and biomass to make products,” says Narayan, “because then the plants fix the carbon and when you make a product from that you have removed carbon dioxide from the environment.” Using biopolymers in clothing can reduce energy and freshwater use and may help mitigate climate change resources. Plus, as the following examples show, some biopolymers can take the creativity of fashion design process in a whole new direction.
Three promising biopolymers—alginate (a polysaccharide), collagen (a fibrous protein), and PHA polyhydroxyalkanoate (a microbe-made polyester)—are already on their way into the fashion production cycle.
Seining Sweaters from the Sea
AlgiKnit uses kelp, a type of seaweed, to produce a biopolymer called alginate, which is then used for textile production. Kelp grows all over the world, forming offshore kelp forests. Some kelp species grow quicker than the fastest-growing terrestrial plant, bamboo, and are inexpensive to farm. As it sprouts, kelp cleans water too—absorbing phosphorous, nitrogen, and five times more carbon dioxide than land plants—so farming it near seaside cities can improve polluted local waters. Like any plant, kelp absorbs carbon to grow, so when used in durable materials, it is also a carbon sink.
A biopolymer spool from Algiknit
AlgiKnit extracts alginate from kelp by adding certain salts to the seaweed base. After the so-called “salt bath” pulls the alginate from the kelp’s cell walls, the biopolymer is extracted from the seaweed residue, dried into a powder and fused into a yarn that can be turned into a variety of fabric types. “The process is similar to that of synthetic materials, where one long continuous strand is produced,” says Tessa Callaghan, the co-founder of AlgiKnit. “The filament can be plied and twisted to increase strength, or cut into short fibers for other purposes.” AlgiKnit won National Geographic’s Chasing Genius Competition for developing this technology.
The team’s big challenge has been to get their end fiber to be strong and flexible enough for use on an industrial knitting machine. It took a lot of experimentation to ensure compatibility between yarns and machines, but one of the team’s goals is to be able to use the yarn in the existing fiber and textile infrastructure, to streamline the new material’s acceptance, Callaghan says.
Yeast-Made Leather, Animal-Free
Modern Meadow’s yeast-produced collagen is another biopolymer that is about to make its runway debut in a form of a leather product named Zoa. The New Jersey-based company designs DNA that can yield collagen, the protein that makes up leather. These specially constructed DNA strands are inserted into the yeast cells. As the yeast cells grow and multiply, they produce collagen and other proteins essential in forming leather, which then cluster together to make a triple-helix collagen molecule. The resulting molecules form bundles that are “cooked” in Modern Meadow’s “secret sauce,” resulting in a leather-like material. “We design DNA that can make collagen, the main building block of leather, then we purify it, and then use an assembly process to turn it into leather,” says Susan Schofer, vice president of business development at Modern Meadow.
Zoa T-shirt in MoMa
Compared to traditional leather industries, Zoa’s production has a lower environmental impact and more fashion design opportunities. To turn a piece of animal hide into bags, shoes, or pants, it must undergo chemical and physical treatments to remove fats, hair, and other impurities. That processing is ecologically and medically fraught—most leather tanning is done in countries with few or unenforced environmental laws because the effluent from the process contains fish-killing sulfides, carcinogenic chromium, and chlorinated phenols that are linked to bladder and nasal cancersin tannery workers.
Using yeast to grow collagen eliminates the animal part of the equation—including slaughter and subsequent hide processing. It yields higher quality materials—perfectly shaped hides without branding marks or scars, and yields very large spans of leather, much bigger than a cow’s body. It also offers nearly endless creative design ideas. The new collagen can be sprayed on top of another fabric to create never-before-seen leather fashions, like the t-shirt that is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its Items: Is Fashion Modern? exhibit. This material can also be embossed or textured in ways that cow or pig leather just can’t.
Modern Meadow will be introducing Zoa to market in 2018. The production facilities are already available from related industries such as biofuels. “We use 200,000 or 500,000-liter fermentation tanks [for the yeast],” says Schofer, “So the infrastructure already exists around the globe to take this from lab to commercial levels.”
Sequester Methane and Wear it Too
A sewage plant and a fashion show couldn’t possibly be further apart—but methane sequestered from wastewater is slowly creeping up onto the runways. California startup Mango Materials makes its fabrics by feeding wastewater methane to methanotrophic bacteria that eat it and produce PHA-based polyester that can be woven into threads or molded into various shapes. Unlike the oil-based PET fabrics, PHA threads are biodegradable. “Because it’s a naturally occurring polymer, there’s a sister organism, a methanogen, that will break it down,” said Anne Schauer-Gimenez, vice president of customer engagement for Mango Materials. But that doesn’t mean that a shirt made from PHAs will be less durable than one made from PET. “If you’re wearing it, and you’re sweating, it won’t break down,” Schauer-Gimenez explains. “But once it ends up in a microbial-rich environment, degradation will occur. It could even degrade in a backyard compost.”
Mango Materials fiber braids
Since methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, clothing made from Mango Materials’ fabrics has the potential to mitigate global warming, if used on a larger scale. When Mango Materials makes its polyester fabrics, the methane is essentially sequestered from the atmosphere, for as long as the clothes remain intact. Of course, when PHA fabrics biodegrade, the methane is re-released, but Mango Materials would like to find a way to keep the gas out of the atmosphere long-term.
Just recently, designer Stella McCartney called for a fashion trade facelift. These biopolymers may be the beginning of this trend.
In case you want to read an article on Fashion Fit Issues and Sustainability by someone else in class....
Read it in its original home at http://www.fashionstudiesjournal.org: http://www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/commentary/2017/9/3/the-results-are-inour-clothes-dont-fit
The
Results Are in...Our Clothes Don't Fit
 |
| All illustrations by Andrea Kennedy |
Those of you who know me know that I've been talking about garment fit for over twenty years. Back in the 1990's, when international trade and overseas apparel production was in its ascendance as manufacturers sought to capitalize on low labor costs overseas, fit really started to become an issue for consumers. Separated by an ocean and a continent or two, designers, patternmakers, and samplehands were no longer working side-by-side creating garments that would perfectly conform to, and therefore beautifully fit, the human body.
My technical reference book: The Apparel
Design and Production Handbook was an attempt to standardize
garment fit in the fashion industry. And it did just that...for a short while.
When the first edition of the handbook was published in 1999, the goals for
most brands and retailers included quality and good fit, even though their
production was going offshore. At that time, fashion companies developed on
average 4.75 fit samples per style, and 33% of garment returns were taken back
to the stores due to poor fit; however, that was then and this is now.
Over the last two decades, the
fashion cycle accelerated, and in turn so have fit issues. Trend cycles have
become faster and, as a consequence, new styles need to hit the stores at both
breakneck speeds and at competitive price points. Many of the steps that used
to make our fashion cycle take 12-18 months from concept to delivery therefore
needed to be shortened so we could design and ship faster and cheaper. In
response to this time crunch, fit samples were unfortunately one of the steps
many brands chose to cut out of the production cycle. Less fit samples meant shorter
lead times. With speed and low costs being the number one goals for most
companies, quality and good fit became comparatively less important.
For many years though, the faster
model worked. High street retailers were selling in massive quantities and
customers were purchasing big shopping bags full of basement bargains and cared
little about how their garments fit. Of course, that fast and furious pace has
down trended and things have now changed: Full-price retail sales are down for
traditional retailers and fit issues are at an all-time high. In the move to
reduce fit samples for shorter leadtimes, great fit was sacrificed. So too,
however, was garment longevity.
According to the 2016 BodyLabs
Apparel & Footwear Retail Survey Report , in 2015, more than $62 billion
worth of clothing and footwear styles were returned due to poor fit and/or
incorrect sizing. Additionally, that study reveals that 64% of consumers
state the main reason for returning clothing is incorrect fit. In another study
out of Iowa State University, 62% of consumers surveyed responded that
they could not find clothing that fit well at retail at all.
Reading these consumer studies is
upsetting to someone who always thinks about garment fit. I wanted to learn why
consumers were experiencing these excessive fit issues, so in October of last
year I set out to study how the fashion industry deals with fit today. I knew
the current consumer data, but no one seemed to be asking the industry
itself. I knew how the industry fit garments twenty years ago – I'd
informally surveyed brands back then. But, I wanted to know what changed, so I
sent out a survey to fashion professionals who currently work on garment fit.
My questions were: How do those
working on fit today feel about fit? How are they fitting? Do they want to
change the way they fit? And, if they do agree fit is a problem, why is their
work perpetuating the fit problems that we all know exist?
The traditional cycle of grading
and fit. With the speeding up of the fashion cycle, however, many of these
steps have been cut out, leading to poor fits for the consumer and a growing
tendency to treat clothing as disposable.
The survey was shared via emails,
Facebook and on the Fashiondex website. There were 16 questions and 467
respondents clicked on and were surveyed. The participants ranged across age
groups and industry positions. All surveyed were over 18 and working in
fashion. The largest age group was 45-55 and 33% of those surveyed were company
owners or CEOs, 25% were technical designers, 14% were fashion designers or
merchandisers, 9% were production managers, and the remaining 19% held a
variety of other fashion company positions.
The results were surprising in
that a whopping 94% of those surveyed agreed that garment fit is a problem in
retail and manufacturing today. This means we, as an industry, agree that we
are putting garments in stores and online that we know do not fit well. When
asked, on a scale of one to 10, to what degree does poor-fit contribute to
returns, markdowns and chargebacks today, the average response was 7.4. Said
differently, today's fashion executives are stating that 74% of their garments
are returned due to fit issues. That's higher than the consumer surveys. Are
you getting distressed...? I am. Producing these ill-fitting garments is
unsustainable. We are in the midst of a climate and population crisis and must
find more responsible ways to produce clothing for more people with fewer
resources; yet, as an industry, we are producing garments that don't fit well.
There's more! Here are a few
other takeaways from the Typeform survey:
•
75% say
speed-to-market is the number-one reason why they have increased fit issues;
there just is not enough time in the fashion cycle to work on great fit.
•
53% state
cost as a factor, stating additional fit samples add expense and today's
customer won't pay more.
•
The
average number of fit samples those surveyed make, fit, and revise per style
is: 1.98. This is almost three fewer fit samples per style than twenty years
ago, but yet returns due to poor fit/sizing doubled.
•
56%
respond that they could obtain better fit for their line if they had more time
in production to perfect fit.
•
52% answer
they would achieve a better fit if they had more fittings on professional fit
models to help them accurately correct fit.
•
And,
sadly, 21% of companies do not fit garments on human people at all. They check
fit on dress forms, via their CAD programs, or by measuring their garment
styles flat. If a garment sample never is put on a human, how can we possibly
know how the garment will hang on the body and if a person will have full range
of motion while wearing it.
•
The full
survey results will be available through Fashiondex in October, but these are
the basic facts. We now know the current fast-fashion supply chain doesn't work
for most brands. We agree too many garments get discarded after a few seasons
and textile landfill waste has increased. Brands and retailers are suffering
and clothing sales are down. So why are we, as an industry, continuing to allow
garment fit to suffer? Don't we want our customers to love the fit of our
brands?
Is the fast-fashion push worth
the sacrifice of the fit of our clothes, the lost dollars from discounts and
returns, and the destruction of the environment?
This recent survey of fashion
executives confirms we are making less samples and at a faster rate.
Economically speaking, perfecting the fit of the clothing we produce is crucial
for companies today, especially when our customers – and we ourselves – agree
that fit is the main reason so much clothing is returned. We must
consider customer satisfaction in order to build our businesses. It is more
important now than it ever has been – especially with the increase in
platforms for our customers to shop. My takeaway from this study is quite
simple: A return to more samples will create better fit, higher quality, and
build sustainability and longevity into our products. In short, let's work on
perfecting our fit.
Notes
[if !supportFootnotes][1][endif] BodyLabs.com;
https://www.bodylabs.com/resources/white-papers/2016-apparel-footwear-retail-survey-report/
[if !supportFootnotes][2][endif] Shin E., Iowa State University (2014) Exploring
consumers' perceptions and satisfaction with apparel in general, http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4191&context=etd
[if !supportFootnotes][3][endif] I created a Typeform survey. View the survey by
typing in this url: https://fitissuesatretail.typeform.com/to/CvI67n
-----
Every Cotton T-Shirt Costs the Environment $3.40, Says Study- published on ecouterre.com
Every Cotton T-Shirt Costs the Environment $3.40, Says Study
by Jasmin Malik Chua , 01/23/17 filed under: Eco-Fashion News
Photo by Shutterstock
Ma Earth is paying through its nose for the clothing we produce, according to a study that quantifies, for the first time,
the price we exact from the ecosystem for our clothing. Case in point? Factoring in the use of water, fertilizer, and
energy along the entire supply chain, a single cotton T-shirt can cost the planet more than 20 Danish kroner, or $3.40,
in financial terms. Extrapolated across the industry, clothing consumption in Denmark alone plunders the environment
of more than DKK 3 billion ($510 million) every year. This toll is much too high, says Kirsten Brosbøl, head of Denmark’s
Ministry of the Environment, which partnered with the IC Group, operator of brands like Tiger of Sweden and Peak
Performance, to commission the report.
INFOGRAPHIC | What’s the Environmental Impact of a T-shirt?
Kirsten Brosbøl, Denmark’s Minister for the EnvironmentCOST AND EFFECT
“Everything, from the enormous amounts of fertilizer and water consumption on cotton fields to carbon-dioxide emissionsfrom leather and zip manufacture, impacts the environment,” Brosbøl says in a statement. “Now we can see what this
actually costs, and even though all our clothes are produced abroad, we still have a responsibility. I call on the industry to
make things better and to use these accounts to reduce their environmental footprint.”
Although Denmark hosts several well-known brands that operate both domestically and abroad, garment manufacturing
within the country itself is limited. (Despite a number of cut-and-sew factories and finishing plants, it doesn’t farm cotton or
produce polyester or other textiles.) In fact, more than 80 percent of Danish apparel is imported as finished product, which
means that most of the industry’s impact stems from activity outside of the country, in places such as China, India, and Turkey.
“We in the clothing industry are well aware that we have some hefty environmental challenges,” says Morten Lehman, corporate
responsibility manager for IC Group. “These accounts provide IC Group with a tool to further qualify our work on sustainability
and to set specific targets for our sustainability efforts in our value chain.”
The report is already changing the way IC Group operates, Lehman adds. “We’ve already used the accounts to discuss CO2RELATED | U.K Fashion Industry to Measure Environmental Impact
emissions with factories in China; emissions we have previously considered as a problem primarily arising from raw materials
production rather than at factories,” he says.
This isn’t the first time “natural capital accounting” has been used to calculate the impact of business activities on natural
resources and ecosystem services. Puma popularized the concept when it released its first Environment Profit & Loss Account in 2011.
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