Sustainability and Sustainable Fashion is a hot topic right
now. Brands and Retailers are marketing sustainable fabrics
and materials as if it's the new black. However, consumers
lack the knowledge to filter out what's actually sustainable and
what's not.
When marketers use terms as sustainability and sustainable
materials as a slogan for a product because it sounds good,
is called greenwashing. Greenwashing is commonly know when
brand says they use "sustainable materials", in most cases
companies at a few percent recycled material and blend it with
polyester, which comes from oil. Greenwashing & words like
Sustainable Materials are confusing costumers think that the
product item is the big problem, when in-fact, shopping is the
biggest problem.
We at Scandinavian Art Design Editorial team want to give you a
little advise to become a more sustainable consumer. We are
dividing this into two parts. Post-consumer waste and
Post-Consumer waste
Pre-consumer waste comes from the Energy, Water and
raw-materials that are taken from the earth to produce
Cotton, Thread, Fabric and Clothes. To minimize Pre-consumer
waste you can do a lot of things. The best is to buy second-hand
clothes. Recycled fabric is another great thing, however both energy
water s used for both recycling process and producing the new item.
So what's Post-Consumer Waste?
First and most forward, it is the number of fashion
products that we purchase today that is unsustainable.
Hence, the more clothes we buy, the less we use each
garments and the more garments we eventually throw.
However, this is not true for everyone. See, if Adam buys 10 shirts
at H&M this year, he might use them for 1 year and then get rid of
them. Probably to recycling or in the worst case, trashcan.
Then there is Ben, a guy who'd rather spend a bit more money for
2 shirts. He Purchases 2 shirts Gucci, he will probably use them for
more than a year, since the quality should be better. When he's
finished and want to get rid of them, he can simply sell them on
Grailed or any Facebook group.
So what do I want to say?
The problem is that the global footprint (Energy, Water and
(raw-material) is 5 times higher for Adam, who purchased
10 items while Ben only got 2. That he bought H&M shirts
do not actually matter. What matters is that cheap low-quality
clothes usually loose their value after consumption, while
high-quality clothes keep their value.
