The inevitable revolution

Why a fashion revolution is guaranteed, and how we can play our part.

Guest blog by Rónán Ó Dálaigh, Founder and CEO of Thriftify

Being an entrepreneur who’s also a climate activist is a blessing and a curse. A blessing to be on the right side of history, and a curse to be up to date on the science of what’s happening to our ecosystem.

All of the metrics and science paint a bad picture, and the fashion industry is right there sitting next to the oil giants and agri-businesses at the round table of climate culprits. In this blog I’ll try to connect the dots between fashion, the crises, charity retail and the coming revolution. The Amazon rainforest, a beacon of sustainability and the natural world, will disappear completely within our lifetime and turn into a Savannah at the current rate of destruction. Approximately 17% of the Amazon has already been destroyed predominantly by intentionally man-made fires. When 20% of it is destroyed, the ecosystem will no longer be able to sustain itself and it will begin to degrade and die rapidly, turning the rainforest into a desert.

What’s this got to do with fashion? Everything.

The primary reason the Amazon is being burned is to make room for illegal agricultural expansion. It’s to raise cattle, not just for meat, but for leather, too. Up to 94% of the Amazon’s deforestation could be illegal (WWF, 2021) yet 10% of the world’s entire leather comes from cattle raised on Brazilian pastures. 

Sometimes we make the mistake of blaming ‘fast fashion’ as the culprit. While ultra-fast fashion brands are deeply problematic, they are not alone. In a recent report by Stand.Earth, all kinds of brands were found to be importing leather from cattle raised on illegally destroyed parts of the Amazon rainforest, including some who globally market themselves as socially and ecologically conscious.

No matter where you look, or at which brand, the fashion industry as a whole is deeply culpable in the ongoing destruction of the natural world.

All you need to do is pick an element and you see how the fashion industry is destroying it.

Let’s look at water. The vast majority of new fashion is made from synthetic materials, with polyester making up 56% of all fibres created. Why is this problematic? Polyester is made from oil (the fashion industry and the fossil fuel industry are best friends, with expectations that the fashion industry will use 102 million tonnes of oil by 2030, up from 62 million in 2015). The single largest source of microplastic pollution is clothing, accounting for 35%. When we wash our clothes, they release up to 1.5 million plastic microfibres into our water streams which make their way into our seas and eventually, back into us, and have recently been found in unborn babies. Now for the scary health implications. Primarily through water, you are consuming about 4gramms of plastic every week, which is like eating an entire credit card. Imagine 52 credit cards stacked up, adding some seasoning and then eating them – that’s what we’re each consuming every year. Scientists have no idea what impact this is going to have on our health because the rise of this pollution has happened so quickly, but the estimates go from terrible to worse. Including the increased likelihood of blood clots and stroke, cancers and even infertility among large swathes of the population. 

Similarly with soil and air we see the same level of destruction, from the horrific impact of the cotton industry on soil degradation to the mass open air fashion landfill sites that catch fire and burn for days. The list goes on.

It’s scary. The fashion industry is monstrous. But it is going to fall. One of two ways, the industry as we know it is doomed.

Firstly, and hopefully not, a climate catastrophe

Rapid and exponential climate degradation may destroy our economies and societies as we know them. From flooding and storms that destroy factories, ports and manufacturing, to heat waves, droughts and crop failures that force millions of people to seek refuge and leave their places of work. Climate degradation gets worse at an exponential rate, due to feedback loops. The easiest feedback loop to explain is the ice caps: As they melt there is less white surface to reflect the sun’s rays, so the oceans get warmer even faster, which melts the ice even faster, which makes the oceans more acidic, which makes life harder for fish, which negatively affects plankton levels, which impacts the seas ability to absorb CO2, and so on and so on. Every single one of the planet’s ecosystems is connected in this way. Thousands of interconnected systems that all degrade at a faster and faster rate as each one speeds up the other’s degradation. In scientific terms, every single observable metric of climate change is worse than what scientists forecasted. From sea level rise to air pollution and much more. When you compare the worst-case forecasts with the real-world change, things are always worse than expected. It’s impossible for any scientist to consider how all these feedback loops affect one another. The path we are currently on is one that ends our entire way of life. Just last week the Secretary General of the United Nations put it as such:

“Our planet is burning. These crises threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet. We must end our suicidal war against nature. We have a rendezvous with climate disaster. The hottest summers of today may be the coolest summers of tomorrow. Once-in-a-lifetime climate shocks may soon become once-a-year events. And with every climate disaster, we know that women and girls are the most affected. The climate crisis is a case study in moral and economic injustice.”

Antonio Guttteras, United Nations Secretary General, 20 September 2022

But there’s an alternative. A vision of the future I believe in and the one that charity retailers have the keys to unlock. 

The alternative – a social, fashion revolution, starting with education

Awareness is the greatest agent for change. The undercurrent of this awareness is already in full flow. In the same way that environmental change happens exponentially, so does social change. It might seem today that our problems are simply too large to overcome, and that things will never change. But when you examine history, the same was thought before women won the vote, before Martin Luther King Jr led the civil rights movement, before unions won us the weekend and the 40 hour working week. All of these movements gained rapid momentum when a critical mass of people went on the educational journey that mobilised them into action. The most hopeful thing about this? Not a single one of these movements had popular support. MLK never went above 35% approval in the opinion polls and the suffragettes were spat on and attacked on the streets. Change doesn’t take everyone, it just takes enough people who refuse to stop trying.

GenZ are the most aware generation in human history, reaching higher levels of higher quality education than any generation before them, and their commitment to a fashion revolution should not be underestimated. In the same way the fossil fuel industry has become a pariah, the fashion industry is next. As awareness of its criminal destruction of key ecosystems spreads, it will follow the fossil fuel industry. In fact, the fashion industry is already trying to combat this by spending millions of marketing dollars on greenwashing campaigns. One ultra-fast fashion brand has recently been ridiculed globally for appointing Kourtney Kardashian, queen of consumerism, as their ‘sustainability ambassador’. The fashion industry pays millions to stay ahead of the trends, to research what young people want and what they know is that young people want change. Instead of real change, they are using mass marketing campaigns to distort and manipulate. But this is a sign of the inevitable change that’s coming. Power resists the fall before it happens.

The question then turns to, what about us? Those of us within charity retail, with a commitment to liberation and a better world. What is our role? Acknowledging our unique place in history is a good starting point. Never again will the world be as it is now. It will either change for the worse, or the better. You simply can’t argue with physics and the facts of climate degradation. Where that leaves us, is with a very simple choice;

How much of a role do we decide to play in supporting the alternative scenario of a social fashion revolution?

I believe that leaning into a courageous, revolutionary position opens up a world of opportunity for charity retailers. A world in which preloved, impactful fashion is the future. Where people prioritise not only buying sustainably but buying for purpose. We empower consumers to become circulators. 

A genuine commitment to this position could mean:

• Bringing our communities (staff, volunteers and shoppers) on the educational journey of why fashion as we know it needs to end. 
• Deeply considering our position of working with fashion brands.
• Committing to only sourcing new goods which have been thoroughly examined to ensure sustainability.
• Collectively taking strong public positions and supporting activist campaigns for change.
• Leading the conversation and putting preloved, impactful fashion at the front of the conversation. 
• Engaging GenZ as an ally, leveraging their influential powers to drive awareness and change.

Undoubtedly, this is not an easy task. Reaching and educating generations from Baby Boomers to GenZ can only be achieved by having a strong presence where they now primarily consume their information: online. This requires an investment in becoming digital-first organisations. We, the impact sector, can champion the scale of the preloved clothing market by investing in areas such as digital commerce technology, expert teams, cross-channel selling, deeper and more detailed categorisation, integrated marketing campaigns that leverage in-store assets, and a full exploration of all garments’ end locations.

The opportunity for the charity retail sector is to become the primary source of fashion. Playing a key role in ending the fashion industry as we know it and redirecting the vast wealth it generates into the causes that matter the most.

P.S. If you’d like to take action straight away, a fantastic starting point is with the incoming and outgoing water in your home. Tapp Filters offer a fully circular solution which removes plastic and other water pollutants as it comes from the tap, removing the main source of micro plastic consumption. On the outgoing side, PlanetCare have a leading solution that removes the microfibres as they leave your washing machine, you’ll be shocked with what it stops from going into the water! 

Rónán Ó Dálaigh is the Founder and CEO of Thriftify, the digital commerce partner that empowers charities to change how and why the world shops. See https://partners.thriftify.com/ for further information.

Sources

Amazon Rainforest destruction and fashion brand culpability
https://www.stand.earth/publication/forest-conservation/amazon-forest-protection/amazon-leather-supply-chain

https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/illegal-deforestation-report-brazil

Leather Production
https://leather-council.org/information/statistics-sources-of-information/

Oil Usage by the fashion industry
https://changingmarkets.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/FOSSIL-FASHION_Web-compressed.pdf

Micro fibre pollution
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43023-x

Plastic found in Placentas
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020322297

% of microfiber pollution coming from clothes
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/reduce-laundry-microfiber-pollution/

UN SecGen Antonio Gutteras Address to UN General Assembly
https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2022-09-20/secretary-generals-address-the-general-assembly