The need to decelerate fast fashion in a hot climate - A global sustainability perspective on the garment industry

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• meaning that the impacts per garment have improved considerably.

• The results of the analysis indicate that the climate impact of clothing and footwear consumption rose from 1.0 to 1.3 Gt carbon dioxide equivalent over the 15 years to 2015.

• fast fashion”, which has been defined as “a business model based on offering consumers frequent novelty in the form of low-priced, trend-led products”

• By accelerating the rate at which new collections are designed and produced, and by constructing cheap and fragile garments, fast fashion makes clothing repair unnecessary (because garments are discarded before they get damaged), uneconomical (because new garments are so cheap) or impossible (because the garments are too flimsy) (Middleton, 2015). Barely used garments are soon thrown away or accumulate in wardrobes in wealthy countries (Roos et al., 2019).

• On a per capita basis, this means while 7.6 kg fibers/person was produced in 1995, that figure rose to 13.8 kg/person in 2018, an 82% increase (47% from 2000 to 2015).

• It indicates that about 75% of the energy demand over the garment life cycle occurs prior to retail sale

• Transportation of garments is relatively insignificant compared to processes that organize physical materials (fiber manufacturing, yarn spinning, textile weaving) and those which reflect the heat capacity or the enthalpy of vaporization of water (wet treatment processes such as bleaching and dyeing).

• Analysis of this kind suggests that most of the impacts of current fashion consumption occur prior to sale, that rejecting fast fashion can be an effective environmental intervention for consumers,

• there is a distinct lack of empirical information about the impacts of the global fashion industry

• the question of where the impacts of the fashion industry arise;

• The selection of the ten most significant countries is based on inspection of the country rankings, selecting the country with the highest result for each of the 8 indicators and continuing down the ranking lists until ten top countries were identified.

• Eliminating the unnecessary size of the fashion industry will require engagement from industry, governments and the non-government sector to try and influence consumers to buy fewer but better clothes.

• A reduction in consumption does not necessarily have a linear relationship with profits, if the industry can justify higher prices for some garments by returning to the better quality and durability of garments made before the era of fast fashion, but a partial redirection of the workforce to less damaging and better paid employment should be contemplated.