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Sophie Benson
In just a few decades, the fashion industry’s fibre mix has completely transformed from favouring natural fibres such as Wool and Cotton to leaning heavily on cheap plastic. That puts a strain on the environment at both ends of the supply chain. At the beginning, you have the extraction of the fossil fuels needed to make these plastic fabrics, and at the end you have plastic clothing sitting in the environment for decades, even centuries, blighting the landscape and shedding microplastics. Fashion is well overdue facing up to its ever-expanding plastic use.
The rise of the use of plastic fibres tracks neatly alongside the rise of fast fashion. In December 1989, the New York Times covered the opening of a Zara store on the famous shopping street Lexington Avenue in New York. The article states that the brand had an emphasis on fast fashion and includes a quote from Juan Lopez, who was heading up the brand’s US operation: “Every week there's a new shipment from Spain… The stock in the store changes every three weeks. The latest trend is what we're after. It takes 15 days between a new idea and getting it into the stores.”
The article set the tone for the 1990s, a decade which drove fashion aimed at customers “on a budget who nonetheless change their clothes as often as the colour of their lipstick.” The trend took off and by 2000, the NYT was covering the opening of H&M on Fifth Avenue, in an article which stated “It’s chic to pay less". But in order to offer “cheap chic”, the industry had to produce more cheaply than ever before, which meant forgoing natural fibres in favour of more inexpensive options like polyester. By the time that H&M location opened, polyester production had overtaken that of cotton. By 2020, after the proliferation of fast fashion e-commerce brands such as Boohoo and ASOS, polyester production was double that of the year 2000.
According to Textile Exchange’s October 2022 Preferred Fibre and Materials Market Report, in 2021 polyester had a market share of 54% of global total fibre production, increasing from 57 million tonnes in 2020 to 61 million tonnes in 2021. Synthetic fibres as a category represented 64% of total fibre production in 2021, far outstripping plant fibres at 28%, animal fibres at 1.62%, and manmade cellulosic fibres at 6.4%.
Synthetic fibres represent 64% of global total fibre production
Polyester production doubled between 2000 and 2020
tonnes of polyester was produced in 2021
In 2021, Changing Markets released its report Synthetics Anonymous, which focused on “fashion brands’ addiction to fossil fuels”. Within the report, the non-profit analysed the percentage of items which contained synthetic fabrics. Of 270 Boohoo products reviewed, 230 (or 85%) of products contained synthetics. The figure was 80% for Walmart, 79% for Uniqlo, and 76% for Forever21. 55% of the Louis Vuitton products reviewed contained synthetics, while 32% of Gucci products did. It's not just fast fashion brands using synthetics, but they are certainly the ones who are most reliant on them.
The number of products which contain synthetics doesn’t represent a company’s overall fibre mix, however. For instance 64% of Zara products contained synthetics while owner Inditex reports that only 40% of its fibres were synthetic in 2022. Equally 65% of H&M’s products contained synthetics (ironically 72% of its “conscious collection” contained them) while 21% of its fibre mix was polyester and 3% was polyamide. But what this apparent mismatch in figures suggests is that many products feature blended fibres which causes problems down the line, as we’ll cover later on.
Some brands do have majority synthetics in their fibre mix, however. Boohoo’s most used materials in 2020 were polyester (56%), cotton (27%), acrylic (7%), viscose (5%), elastane (3%) and ‘other’ (2%), meanwhile polyester currently accounts for 64% of Shein’s fibre mix.
“While the industry has made commitments towards the 1.5° pathway,” the Textile Exchange report reads, “the virgin fossil-based synthetic fibre volumes continue to increase… Without rethinking untethered growth, the industry will not stay within the 1.5° pathway.”
Per Changing Markets, the production of synthetic fibres currently accounts for 1.35% of global oil consumption, which amounts to more than the annual oil consumption of Spain. In order to make polyester and other synthetic fibres, fossil fuels are extracted via methods including drilling, pumping, and fracking. These fuels are then transported to refineries, sometimes through pipelines that can pollute water supplies, leak oil into the surrounding environment, leak gas and cause explosions, and disrupt sacred Indigenous land. Refining fossil fuels and turning them into synthetic fibres requires factors such as heat, pressure, chemical reactions, extrusion, spinning, stretching, washing, and drying, all of which often require the burning of yet more fossil fuels, compounding the fashion industry's reliance on carbon emitting, non-renewable resources.
To stick to the 1.5° pathway, which was called for in the Paris Agreement, emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. If the exponential growth of fossil fuel-based plastic fibres continues, the industry has no chance of meeting that goal.
The extraction and production of synthetics isn’t the only threat to the environment. Fast fashion necessitates a lightning speed churn of trends and as consumers discard clothes to make way for new, there simply aren’t the systems in place to deal with them. The result is environmental dumping grounds getting larger by the minute. 40% of the 15 million garments sent to Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana each week end up as waste and become embedded in the surrounding environment and entangled on the shoreline. In 2021, over 900 million items of clothing were exported to Kenya. 458 million of those clothing items were waste, and up to 307 million of them were likely to contain plastic-based fibres. Echoing the scenes in Accra, the banks of the Nairobi River are strewn with textile waste. In the Atacama Desert, Chile, the mountains of discarded clothes can now be seen from space.
Given the amount of fashion takeback schemes advertised, it's reasonable to wonder why these clothes aren't being recycled, but less than 1% of textiles are currently recycled and textile-to-textile recycling technology is still in the early stages, with a lot of investment needed for it to scale meaningfully. A new report called Take-back Trickery from Changing Markets highlights that even when consumers think their old clothes are being recycled, they're more often than not destroyed or landfilled, despite being placed in brand-owned recycling bins. Generally, the startups that are succeeding, like Infinna, are focused on recycling single fibre types because recycling blends is particularly difficult. Currently, mixed fibres are a prime candidate for mechanical recycling but this can shorten the fibres, therefore the resulting product is usually a "downcycle", used for applications such as insulation or construction.
It would be inaccurate to state that all of the unrecycled clothes sitting in the environment are plastic, but plastic clothing poses a particular problem because it will take decades or even centuries to break down, therefore blighting the environment in the Global South for generations to come. As the clothes do eventually begin to breakdown, they shed microplastics into the soil and water supplies. But this doesn’t just happen at dumpsites, plastic clothing sheds microplastics as it's worn and washed too. It’s estimated that up to 35% of all microplastics come from clothing and textiles, and one study suggested that up to 65% of microplastics may be emitted to aerial environments during the drying and wearing of garments. The implications of this microplastic pollution aren't just environmental either, they find their way into our bodies and are linked to immune system disruption, reproductive issues, and oxidative stress.
“Fossil fuels, including oil, are the driving force for climate change and we need to think about how the future should look if we want to have a future. We cannot continue being dependent on oil,” says Katya Kruk, Impact & Innovation Director at ArmedAngels, which launched an oil-free fashion campaign for SS23. 99.62% of the summer collection is made from natural fibres or recycled materials, according to the brand but some areas, Kruk says, are harder to convert than others. For instance, creating stretch jeans and activewear is challenging without the use of elastane. “One of our principles is ‘nature over oil’ and that means we will be choosing solutions that are based on nature instead of oil. When there is no solution, we will keep looking,” says Kruk.
Thankfully, solutions continue to emerge. Heritage denim brand Candiani created Coreva, a 100% natural, biodegradable and compostable yarn derived from natural rubber. Brands including Stella McCartney and Hiut have used the yarn. Swiss sportswear brand Mover has eradicated plastic fibres entirely, turning back to a mix of heritage fibres and modern innovations including wool, cotton, Ventile, and Swisswool. HeiQ AeoniQ is a cellulosic endless filament yarn which can be sourced from Algae, bacteria, or food waste. Made in a closed-loop process, the fibre has elastic properties and is designed to be a replacement for polyester and nylon. Celliant Viscose is another viable option for performance wear as it's lightweight, odour resistant, and temperature regulating, while Pakafill brings the same properties to insulation. BioFluff offers a home compostable alternative to faux fur, and NFW’s entire roster of materials can be used to create a plastic-free fashion system. Mirum is a plastic-free alternative to plastic ‘vegan leathers’. Its Clarus technology can be used to supercharge the properties of natural fibres such as cotton and hemp, creating performance fibres that give synthetics a run for their money. Pliant replaces plastic shoe soles, Tunera replaces plastic foams. The entire range has been used to create a 100% plastic-free sneaker: The Degenerate by Unless Collective.
For all the new innovations, traditional fibres such as cotton, wool, Linen, and Hemp should not be overlooked as they are tried and tested fibres with desirable qualities. In many (perhaps most) cases the solutions to a plastic-free future for fashion already exist, it just depends on brands following in the footsteps of the likes of ArmedAngels and Mover and making bold moves to overhaul their material mix. Don't dismiss what worked before because of the modern hunt for newness.