HOW NEW IS YOUR WARDROBE REALLY?

By Abigail Isherwood

Most of us have experienced walking into a highstreet clothes shop, through the big glass doors into the air conditioned room full of rows and rows of textures and colours. This is usually accompanied by a sense of newness, but when we pick out a pair of jeans, it hasn’t just appeared on the shelf out of thin air. It has come from somewhere, it’s made of something, by someone. The fashion industry, the way that pair of jeans gets to the shelves in the first place, has an incredibly large impact on the world. Did you know that:

  1. Textile production contributes more to climate change than international aviation and shipping combined and the fashion industry is responsible for 8% of carbon emissions.

  2. Three out of five fast fashion items end up in a landfill.

  3. Washing, solvents, and dyes used in manufacturing are responsible for one-fifth of industrial water pollution and fashion accounts for 20 to 35 percent of microplastic flows into the ocean

  4. The textile sector still represents 10 to 20 percent of pesticide use. and the fashion industry is projected to use 35% more land for fibre and textile produce by 2030, further threatening biodiversity.

  5. Forced, bonded, and child labour are all forms of modern slavery that are prevalent within the fashion industry.

  6. 93% of brands surveyed by the Fashion Checker aren’t paying garment workers a living wage.

We know that fast fashion is unsustainable and we desperately need change in the industry as a whole. We need everyone to act, from policymakers, industry leaders, and retailers, to us, the consumers. Although we may feel powerless, individual action can make a difference.

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So what can we do? Jennifer Darmo from Good On You says that “by thinking of the garments we wear as short term tools rather than long term investments, we contribute to wasteful consumption patterns that inevitably lead us towards drastic climate change”. One of the first things I do to get out of this ‘short-term’ mindset is to remember that whatever I am buying isn’t really new. It was grown, picked, sewn, dyed, transported and packaged long before it arrived at my door. It has gone through a process and contributed to a system that results in the heavy impact demonstrated above.  

Just as one item of clothing contributes to a huge impact, you, as a human being with a voice, have a huge impact too! Especially when combining your voice and action with the action of others. Because we are not living in isolation from each other, despite the year we have just had. We have an incredible power and impact on the people and the world around us. And when we put our mind to something together, when we decide that it’s time for us to change, it truly can change. 

So when we’ve just heard that the IPCC report is calling the climate crisis a code red for humanity, and we’re probably feeling overwhelmed, helpless and a thousand other emotions that come when facing this crisis, let’s remember that we don’t have to do this alone. We can surround ourselves with people and voices who inspire us to keep going. The people who help us change our shopping habits for the better, who remind us how to stop supporting fast fashion, and keep us feeling creative and excited about the new sustainable lifestyle that we are building together. 

Now more than ever is the time to lean on each other and find those little sparks of hope that drive us to take the next step forward.

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TIMBER CHAIN - SUPPLY CHAIN INTEGRITY

Environmental non-profit organisation Preferred by Nature and blockchain-inspired identity platform iov42 announced the launch of Timber Chain, a new service that will enable stakeholders across timber supply chains to improve efficiency, transparency and security through a secure blockchain application, storing all information in one place. By combining blockchain technology, third-party certification, and market knowledge, the Timber Chain modernises traceability; introducing real-time digital data recording, replacing traditional, paper-based processes which are labour intensive and often prone to human error.  

The Timber Chain service has been built to improve and secure the interactions between all stakeholders across the supply chain from forest to shelf. The security, productivity, and sustainability of international timber markets are too often affected by corruption and the fragmented nature of the industry, impacted further by outdated methods for information gathering and verification. Through Timber Chain, all data and claims are checked and certified by a reputable third party. All data is stored and secured by iov42's distributed ledger technology, ensuring complete data integrity and confidence by utilising blockchain; a system of recording information in a way that makes it impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system.  

The new application was first piloted by global wood trader of over 30 years, Carl Ronnow, who will continue using the Timber Chain following its launch as a full service. Having appreciated the increased levels of transparency and security provided by the new platform. Dick Anning, Carl Ronnow Environment Manager states that “Carl Ronnow are always look for opportunities to increase the levels of credibility and transparency to the due diligence information that we offer to our buyers. By committing to uploading all of this due diligence information onto a secure digital database such as Timber Chain created by IoV42 , and combining this with our Preferred by Nature’s LegalSource due diligence certification, we know that we have found a new avenue for meeting these goals.”

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What the platform can achieve

Replacing traditional, paper-based processes: The Timber Chain modernises traceability away from labour-intensive processes to real-time, digital data recording. The service standardises data capture, analysis, and reporting and grants access to reports to relevant stakeholders, such as certifiers, regulators and buyers. This streamlines the information gathering, collating, and verification process for organisations. 

Certification and auditing, made easy: With all relevant information stored in one location, Preferred by Nature can easily access and verify that organisations are compliant with certification criteria. This will reduce the need for certification bodies to make individual trips to sift through an organisation’s paper records to perform audits. Relevant certificates are issued and stored digitally, saving time and resources for both certification bodies and audited organisations. 

Seamless, secure supply chain management: Only organisations with verified Timber Chain identities will be able to upload information to the service, though the information can be made visible to external parties specified by Timber Chain users. 

SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT BY UNSUBSCRIBING FROM EMAILS

By Christine Wallace

Before writing this article, I used to be the kind of person who never deleted emails. I had an inbox of unopened emails in the hundreds if not thousands, knowing that most of them where subscriptions or newsletters I would never get around to reading. With roughly 294 billion emails having been sent and received every day in 2019, a figure set to only rise on a yearly basis, I don’t think I am alone in this. This raises the question of what, if any, impact do all these emails have on the environment? The answer is that, after taking in to account the energy used to send the email and the infrastructure needed in order to send it, every email sent creates around 4g of CO2 emission. As a result, 294 billion emails soon add up to just short of 1.2 million kilograms of CO2 emissions, an incredibly significant number when talking about climate change. A recent BBC article found that if everyone living in the UK sent one less email a day, it would equal tens of thousands of flights to Europe. Although this impact is still a scratch on the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases we add yearly to the atmosphere, it is a step in the right direction on the UK’s legal obligation to reach Net Zero by 2050. Managing your emails is just one step you can take to lowering your individual electricity demand and one which we can all do quickly and at no extra cost.

There is another environmental benefit in unsubscribing to fashion-based subscriptions in particular. The impact of producing and making clothes is monumental to green house emissions. A single pair of jeans adds an equivalent of 33.4kg of carbon. In fact, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change per year than all international flights and maritime travel combined. Every year it uses 93 billion cubic meters of water, enough for five million people. It is not just the resources that go in to making clothes that is the issue, but also the sheer amount of consumption and waste that follows it. Every week 13 million items of clothing end up in UK landfills. By unsubscribing to fashion marketing, you are less likely to impulse buy and over buy, helping save both your money and the environment. 

Less clothes

Unsubscribing, or even just clearing out your inbox, can also help the environment by reducing the server space used up by stored emails. The average number of emails in a person’s inbox today is 200, with each email size averaging 75kb, all of these stored emails are kept in data centres which require a large amount of energy to function. Roughly 2% of the world’s electricity is consumed by data centres and with data gathering continuing to grow this is expected to reach 8% by 2030. To put this into perspective, this is a greater energy consumption than some of the lesser developed countries. What makes this statistic more shocking is that only 6% of the data in those centres, including all those stored emails you have, is in active use. The result of this is simple, more fossil fuels are being burned to create the energy to keep your ‘data landfill’ functioning. Luckily, unlike the landfills those 13 million pieces of clothing go to each week in the UK, we as individuals can reverse our impact immediately simply by pressing the delete button.  

In its efforts to tackle climate change the world is making progress on relying on renewable energy sources to power our day-to-day activities, which may leave some thinking that as individuals we do not need to lower our energy consumption. However, as the world population grows, our way of living demands more energy and as lesser developed countries move closer to the living standards of developed countries, we need to lower our personal consumption and develop more energy efficient technology so that our consumption of electricity does not out scale our ability to produce it cleanly.

Christine Wallace

Christine Wallace