adminser The global fashion industry is facing increasing challenges in terms of sustainability. Beyond macro-factors, the biggest challenge facing corporations is misinformation and bad scientific practices. The subject of sustainability is a hot topic that has drawn a number of commentators who have limited knowledge.
The global fashion industry is facing increasing challenges in terms of sustainability. Beyond macro-factors, the biggest challenge facing corporations is misinformation and bad scientific practices. The sustainability topic is a hot-button issue that has drawn a number of commentators who have a limited understanding of scientific facts.
The issue would not have been as serious if the unscientific discourse had only affected isolated groups. Journalists and writers use specific numbers and phrases that have been decontextualized and are not representative of their original research. It is hard to locate sources, for example, for claims such as fashion being responsible for 20 percent of wastewater, 4% of global waste, and four-fifths (or more) of all workers. Even widely-published books have been affected. Mike Redwood is a leather expert who writes that when he asked Mike Berners Lee about his sources in his influential environmental book How Bad Are Bananas? When asked about the sources for his influential environmental book How Bad Are Bananas, Mike Berners-Lee replied that he had taken the figures from published tables without questioning them.
This is not just a problem for journalists. The Higg Index, developed by Sustainable Apparel Coalition, is one of the fashion industry’s most popular decision tools. For an index with major implications in defining what is and isn’t sustainable, it should be able to withstand scientific scrutiny. Its methodologies must also be beyond reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be the truth. SAC has recently raised the MSI score for silk from 681 up to 1086, while decreasing polyester’s from 44 down to 36. It is essentially a statement that replacing one kilogram of silk with even a small amount of polyester (less than 30kg) would save the environment. This significant change was made without any explanation of what caused it or how the new scores were calculated.
The International Sericultural Commission, which represents the global silk industry, is understandably upset. ISC claims that Higg MSI’s current scoring system for silk has major faults’ and calls to stop using it until an ‘independent’ and ‘credible’ life cycle assessment is created. According to Veronica Bates Kassatly’s research, the data behind the silk score is from a University of Oxford 2014 study titled ‘Life Cycle Assessment of Indian Silk.’ The study was conducted on rural smallholder farmers in a small area of southern India. The Higg score, on the other hand, claims to indicate the impact of silk produced industrially and that virtually none comes from the area covered by the study.
SAC is secretive in its approach, offering only vague responses on its portal. Data sharing has only been done once when SAC conducted four-year research at the University of California Berkeley. It allowed access to data from version 2.0 of the Higg Facility Environmental Module, which was retired in December 2017. After the completion of the report, the co-author was invited to provide consulting services for the company.
Not only has the silk industry questioned the validity of the index, but Wool and Leather are also upset. According to current scores, cow leather has a Higg MSI of 176 per kilogram compared with nylon, which only has an impact of 29. The International Council of Tanners and thirteen other co-signatory organizations wrote to Julie Brown, Director of the Higg index, on October 8 this year. They claimed that the Higg score for Leather does not incorporate basic understandings into its methodological decisions and data and misleads users. In the letter, it is claimed that the score is based only on data from before 2013. It refers to a limited study of Brazilian and US herds and is, therefore, not representative of the current leather supply chain status. The letter also demanded the suspension of the Higg Index leather score.
Both sectors claim that thaHiHigg’s cradle-to-factory gate assessment is inaccurate and fails to recognize critical phases such as end-of-life and use. A calculation of impact until the factory door ignores that leather and silk products are used or worn more than polyester and nylon products and don’t release toxic microfibres when in use.
Surprisingly, an industry with such a large impact on the economy and people’s lives has so few scientific studies that explain how to calculate sustainability impacts’s time to move beyond greenwashing, shock journalism, and commentators who hunt for the worst cases of sustainability and portray them as the norm.
