The article I found interesting was about how technological advances is influencing the fashion industry on CBInsights titled “Fashion Forward: How Tech is Targeting Waste & Pollution In The $2.4T Dollar Industry.” The article relates to both parts of the assignment with technological innovation and environmental movement in the fashion industry. The article tells us that in a 2017 report, the fashion industry was using 26.4 trillion gallons of water, 98M tons of oil per year, and half a million microfibers from clothing are leaking into our oceans each year. The article talks about how fast fashion, being fueled by social media, makes consumers seek trends as quickly as they can and producers are rapidly spitting out clothing. Fast fashion is the primary problem with the environmental issues the fashion industry causes. Fast fashion is often found leading to overproduction and large amounts of waste produced. The article tells us that H&M reported having $4 billion dollars’ worth of unsold inventory in 2018. They also tell us how it is not just unsold inventory causing problems, that about 73% of clothes end up in in landfills or incinerated.
Seeing how fast fashion has becoming increasingly problematic for the environment, the fashion industry is utilizing technology to make clothing production and consumption more sustainable through the “use of plant-based textiles and bacteria-based dyes to leveraging a blockchain-based supply chain to increase transparency.” The fashion industry is looking at options such as alternative fabrics to reduce waste and pollution because using natural fibers like cotton are more resource intensive (one cotton shirt requires 713 gallons of water to produce). Brands are trying to use agriculture waste such as leaves to create more eco-friendly products. An example of a company utilizing a more eco-friendly approach is an Italy-based company called Orange Fiber. Orange Fiber is extracting cellulose from rinds of juiced oranges and converting them into a material that closely resembles silk.
The fashion industry is directly linked to soil degradation and biodiversity loss due to the use of cotton and other raw materials and because of this they are looking to new ways such as regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture focuses on composting, avoiding synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and planting crops that grow year round to enrich the soil and prevent erosion.
After reading all the ways that the article tells us about how the fashion industry is using technology to lessen its environmental footprint on the environment, I think that we have a lot in store for the future of the fashion industry. With technology constantly evolving and the creative minds of all those in the fashion industry, we are finding new ways to continually make clothing products more sustainable and eco-friendly and also fixing the problems that the industry created. There are tons of new options that they are exploring for making clothes, and innovating the ways we create textiles, that the possibilities are endless.
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