On Greenwashing
This is the second post in a series of three posts that are all related. There’s a lot in these three topics, and I want to go deep into them.
On Fast Fashion (Read here)
On Greenwashing (read on!)
On Avoiding vs Living with Fast Fashion (coming soon)
If you get the basics of fast fashion, you’re probably wondering well okay, I’ll make sure to not buy from those retailers - H&M, Zara, Forever 21. Easy enough, right?
If only. Unfortunately, the lack of regulations around the fashion industry’s supply chains, manufacturing practices, and materials means that there’s a lot of room for brands to market themselves as more sustainable than they are. This is what is known in the industry as Greenwashing.
What is Greenwashing?
From Investopedia:
Greenwashing is the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company's products are more environmentally sound. Greenwashing is considered an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a company's products are environmentally friendly.
From CorpWatch:
Disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.
Where do we see Greenwashing?
My favorite example: boxed water. If you’ve been in any airport in the last few years, you’ve probably seen it. “Boxed water is better”, claims the label in bold letters contrasted on a stark white background. Better… how? Their branding is great, and reading their website really makes you feel like they’re making a difference. They plant trees! Wow! Recycled materials? Cool. They even have an initiative to clean beaches. Who doesn’t love pristine beaches, am I right?
Okay, let’s get real for a second though. A few clicks away from their homepage, you come to this image:
What do you notice? Did you notice that at the very bottom in tiny cramped writing it says “3% plastic film”? This material is also known as layered cardboard is really hard to recycle in most places. So while all of their marketing says that they’re better, you have to ask yourself - “Better than what?” Better than throwing away plastic bottles? Better than reusable water bottles or even refilling plastic water bottles? You can answer that one.
You can probably think of other examples: food from Pepsico/Nestle that is repackaged to look like it came straight from a farmer’s market, Keurig K-cups, Dawn dish soap. Aw, but the duckies! I know… And so do the people behind those genius commercials.
How to spot Greenwashing in Fashion
I hope you understand the harm that can come from marketing something as being more green than it is. People who aren’t doing their research (unlike you, smarty pants!) are likely to fall into these traps laid out by people who get paid a lot of money to set them. I don’t blame you if you’ve fallen for these tactics before, you’re one person against an army of people who are dedicated to figuring out how to make people who care about the earth buy things that aren’t necessarily-100%-guaranteed-absolutely-positively good for the planet.
In the fashion industry, we see this very commonly, especially in the last few years with all of the attention on this issue. It can be hard to spot, but if you’re looking into a brand, there are some ways to spot greenwashing. Once you practice looking for these signs of greenwashing, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.
Initiatives to reduce carbon emissions
A brand that is talking a lot about what its corporate office is doing to reduce carbon emissions might be trying to distract from the fact that their supply chain isn’t being evaluated in order to reduce their carbon footprint. Their Instagram and website might be filled with pictures of happy people working surrounded by a forest of plants, biking, or cleaning up local parks. If they’re not focused on their manufacturing practices, sources of their raw materials, and shipping and transportation emissions, they’re not focusing on the right thing.
Spotlighting eco-friendly materials
Bamboo, cotton, rayon- All sound better than they really are. While the raw materials might give us the warm fuzzies, the process of making them into wearable and usable fabrics can be extremely water-intensive, contribute to water pollution, and ecologically damaging including deforestation.
If you’re curious about the impact of materials that you see on your clothes, you can check out this index: https://msi.higg.org/page/msi-home
Look out for certifications such as GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) and OCS 100 (Organic Content Standards) on certain raw materials.
A sustainable “collection”
This is to me as good as McDonald’s (in America) saying that they’re vegetarian-friendly. So you want me to eat a tiny salad and french fries and call it a meal? Similarly, what good is one H&M collection when the rest of their line is the same old? Brands that hope that one small line of organic cotton t-shirts or clothes that “give back” are 100% guilty of greenwashing and hoping that their efforts in one area can cover up their lack of movement or progress in others. Beware!
Overall vagueness in statements, claims, and goals
Like I said above, words like “sustainable,” “ethical,” “green,” and “eco-friendly” have no official meaning in the industry, so there’s nothing stopping brands from using these words to try to make themselves seem better than they are. Even statistics and data that they provide should be scrutinized - look closely at the timeframes that they’re comparing, their company size, and when the data was last updated. If their goals seem really squishy or only attainable because they moved manufacturing locations to somewhere with tighter regulations, that might be a sign that they’re doing the bare minimum and just paying lip service to sustainability.
Brands known for Greenwashing
Brace yourselves, this might sting a little. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of brands that are known to boost their eco-friendliness through PR initiatives and marketing content.
H&M
Zara
Fashion Nova
Nasty Gal
Everlane
Nike
Asos
Calvin Klein & Tommy Hilfiger - This is an interesting one. Comment below if you can figure out why I’ve listed them here!
The Simple Take: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Do your research, and make sure that you’re comfortable with the amount of data that you’re seeing on the brand’s supply chain and labor practices.
My favorite resource for researching particular brands is Good On You’s brand directory: https://directory.goodonyou.eco/ I love the way they break down each brand by environmental impact, labor practices, and animal rights. This way you can choose what matters most to you, and how much!
Remember, you don’t have to be perfect. If you’re reading this and curiously research a bunch of brands that you’ve made purchases from, don’t feel bad! We all start somewhere, and I encourage you to vote with your wallet moving forward.
Sources:
https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/greenwashing-in-fashion
https://goodonyou.eco/how-can-you-tell-when-a-fashion-brand-is-greenwashing/
My last post in this series will be on how you can reconcile shopping fast fashion and also I’ll include some of my personal favorite brands if you want to dive in and explore some sustainably made clothes and home goods!
On Fast Fashion
This is the first post in a series of three posts that are all related. There’s a lot in these three topics, and I want to go deep into them.
On Fast Fashion (read on!)
On Greenwashing (coming soon)
On Avoiding vs Living with Fast Fashion (coming soon)
Once you start going down the sustainable fashion rabbit hole, it’s not long before you come across the term “fast fashion”. It’s unfortunate that it’s become such a buzzword, but it’s an important concept that is central to a lot of conversations around the sustainable fashion movement.
What is Fast Fashion?
From Investopedia:
Fast fashion is the term used to describe clothing designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to meet new trends. The collections are often based on designs presented at Fashion Week events. Fast fashion allows mainstream consumers to purchase trendy clothing at an affordable price.
From Lexico (Oxford Languages):
Inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.
"the high-street leader when it comes to fast fashion"
From Good On You:
Fast fashion can be defined as cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments in high street stores at breakneck speed.
History can give us some context about why this phenomenon became prevalent in the first place.
Fashion before the Industrial Revolution was by nature slow. “High fashion” as it was called was really something for only the wealthy aristocratic classes, and they set the trends for the current season. Most people though, dressed within their class, and didn’t have the means or access to get custom-fitted garments. This didn’t mean that they didn’t care about fashion, but they would have accessed trends late, or had to make modifications to their own clothes to fit with the emerging styles.
As the Industrial Revolution picks up steam starting in the 1800s, we start to see a natural boost in production capabilities with the invention of the loom. From then until about the 1960s, more and more fashion houses took measures to standardize and industrialize their production capabilities. WWII also impacted this, as many fashion houses devoted resources to creating uniforms and other materials for the war efforts.
And then come the 1960s. Along with the Civil Rights Movement, counterculture, and angst about the Vietnam War came a resistance to old social norms. Fashion, being one of the best ways of self-expression, became something that the younger generation of the 60s really tried to make their own. There was a strong desire to move away from the fashions of the older generations, and fashion retailers began to realize this. The search for cheap and new fashions led them to the first wave of “fast fashion” retailers who realized they could open up manufacturing centers in other parts of the world, where we still see a prevalence of sweatshops today: Central America, China, India, and other parts of South America and Asia.
A few factors then led to what we see today as trends change literally as soon as you feel like you have a handle on the latest styles: technology (being able to buy something from your phone with a couple taps), marketing (in some ways, retailers are all in a rat race, trying to beat each other to come out with next season’s hottest thing), celebrity culture (magazines telling us what to wear/what not to wear, celebrities never being shown repeating outfits).
Why is Fast Fashion so bad?
If you go to H&M, Zara, Forever21, or any other major retailer in a mall or shopping complex, you’ll likely see prices that are tantalizingly low. $3.95 for a tank top, $12.99 for a dress, $10 for 2 blouses. How do these retailers manage to sell these clothes for so cheap, while staying in business? The answer comes pretty quickly if you think about their supply chain: cheap labor and materials allows them to price low enough to keep the demand going. Constantly changing the trends also allows them to really market products to make people feel like they need them. This is where our consumerist culture got out over its skis.
Environmental Impact
To keep up with the demand for cheaply made “trendy” clothes, the industry inevitably started cutting lots of corners. Cheap dyes and textiles are often the most harmful to produce and shed microfibers and toxins into our water supplies. Greenwashing efforts have made us think that even cotton is good for the environment, when in reality it has an extremely water- and pesticide-intensive production process, leading to droughts and biodiversity problems in the areas it is farmed.
People Impact
To maintain those door-buster deals, the people hired to make those clothes are often hired at extremely low wages and in dangerous (or just downright unpleasant) working conditions. The documentary “True Cost” goes into a lot more detail on this: https://truecostmovie.com/
On the side where we sit as consumers, there’s also an unfortunate side effect of this that comes in the form of a ton of angst and FOMO. Constantly seeing new trends and designs reinforces a culture where we are never satisfied with what we have, leading to a lot of wasted time and money, if you’re throwing away or even donating clothes.
Is Fast Fashion Getting Better?
Changing an entire industry that has been rooted in near-instant gratification, the next Big Thing, and putting profits over planet is going to be slow. We’ve started to see more and more brands call out what their sustainable initiatives are, in responses to media outcry like “True Cost” which had notable fashion icons like Stella McCartney, Vandana Shiva and Livia Firth speak out against what mainstream fashion brands have been getting away with. Pulling the curtain back has made a lot of brands go on the defensive. This is where things can get a little shadey. It can be really hard to tell if a brand is actually taking steps to improve their practices, or if they are doing the bare minimum and “greenwashing” their brand.
What is Greenwashing?
Greenwashing is a marketing tactic that brands use to make themselves seem more environmentally responsible than they really are. An example of this is bottled water that markets itself as natural and organic. Isn’t that obvious? What they’re really trying to make you forget is that their bottles are plastic and most likely won’t be reused or recycled. The same concept applies in fashion when a company markets themselves as “green” or “eco-friendly”, but then doesn’t really provide any data or facts around how.
Like I said, I’ll have a whole post on greenwashing so this is just a bit of a primer. In the meantime, here’s a great article from Vogue UK about ways to watch out for Greenwashing: https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/greenwashing-in-fashion
The Simple Take: Nobody is winning by playing by Fast Fashion rules.
British journalist Lucy Siegle said it best:
Fast Fashion isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, is paying.
As consumers, the best we can do is to make informed choices that will last. The less we buy overall the better, and when necessary, we should try to make things last as long as they can. This is a sound philosophy for most things in life - invest in quality over quantity.
Unlinked sources:
Fashion History Lessons: The Origins of Fast Fashion, Fashionista: https://fashionista.com/2016/06/what-is-fast-fashion
What Is Fast Fashion, Good On You: https://goodonyou.eco/what-is-fast-fashion/
Stay tuned for my next post about greenwashing: what it is, how you can figure out if a brand is greenwashing, and brands that are known for that practice (and better alternatives!)