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Concept
Sustainable fashion
Summary
Sustainable fashion (also known as eco-fashion) is a term describing products, processes, activities, and people (policymakers, brands, consumers) that aim to achieve a carbon-neutral fashion industry built on equality, social justice, animal welfare, and ecological integrity. Sustainable fashion concerns more than fashion textiles or products, rather addressing the entire process in which clothing is produced, consumed and disposed of. The movement looks to combat the large carbon footprint that the fast fashion industry has created by reducing the environmental impact such as air pollution, water pollution and climate change.
In 2020, it was found that voluntary self-directed reform of textile manufacturing supply chains by large companies to reduce the environmental impact was largely unsuccessful. Measures to reform fashion production beyond greenwashing requires policies for the creation and enforcement of standardized certificates, along with related import controls, subsidies, and interventions such as eco-tariffs.
The origin of sustainable fashion movement is intertwined with the modern environmental movement, with the publication in 1962 of the book Silent Spring by American biologist Rachel Carson. Carson's book exposed the serious and widespread pollution associated with the use of agricultural chemicals, a theme still relevant to the environmental and social impact of fashion today. The decades which followed saw humans' impact on the environment more systematically investigated, notably the effects of industrial activity. New concepts were introduced for discussing these effects, such as sustainable development, a term coined in 1987 by the Brundtland Report.
In the early 1990s, roughly coinciding with the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, popularly known as the Rio Earth Summit, 'green issues' (as they were called at the time) made their way into fashion and textiles publications.
Official source
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