How do the sustainable goals link to the fashion industry?

The legal minimum wage in most garment-producing countries is rarely enough for a worker to live on. For example, the legal minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh is 8,000 taka (equivalent to about £73) per month. However, campaigners say workers need double that amount for a decent standard of living. According to Labour Behind the Label, there is a gap of 2 to 5 times, between minimum or industry-standard wages, and most living wage benchmarks based on a cost of living methodology. Research conducted by Deloitte Access Economics for Oxfam has revealed that just 4% of the price of a piece of clothing is estimated to make it back to the workers. Even if big brands passed the entire cost increase of paying living wages to the workers on to consumers by increasing the price they pay for an item, Deloitte estimates this would increase the price of a piece of clothing sold by just 1%.

The fashion industry is one of the biggest contributors to forced labour, according to the Global Slavery Index produced by the Walk Free Foundation. According to the report produced by the Walk Free Foundation, “our most at-risk garments are imported from China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil and Argentina.” Forced, bonded and child labour can be found in myriad forms in fashion supply chains. For example, around 170,000 people are forced by the government to pick cotton in Uzbekistan each year — cotton that ends up in the clothes we may purchase from major fashion brands.

Recent research from the University of California, Berkley found that women and girls from the most marginalised communities toiled for as little as 15 cents an hour in homes across India. Child labour and forced labour were rife and wages regularly suppressed. Homeworking is common across supply chains in the fashion industry. Homeworking entails people often working without formal contracts or insurance and are paid in cash. Because homeworkers tend to be found in the informal economy, they do not have the same legal protections as formal workers. If they face exploitation, it is difficult for them to seek recourse. This is true not just for cheap clothing but also in the luxury fashion sector. An investigation by the New York Times found unregulated homeworkers in parts of Italy getting paid €1.50 to €2.00 per hour and working 16 to 18 hour days to make luxury garments for big-name brands.

Low pay and exploitation of working people happens in other parts of the fashion industry too. According to Trade Union Congress, retail is the worst industry in the UK for pay and progression, with just over half a million workers aged between 18 and 29 stuck in low-paid retail work. At the farm level, hundreds of thousands of farmers have committed suicide across the cotton-growing belt of India since the mid-1990’s. Many farmers incur debt they can’t afford to pay back, especially during periods of failed crops, drought and due to volatile financial markets. Accelerating climate breakdown further threatens to make their problems worse.

A 2019 World Bank report found that just six countries give women and men equal legal rights. This is an improvement from a decade ago, in which the report found that no country guaranteed full legal equality.
Globally, women are estimated to earn 77% of what men earn, although these figures understate the real extent of gender pay gaps, particularly in developing countries where informal self-employment is prevalent, and almost 40% of women in wage employment do not have access to social protection.

According to CARE International, nearly one in three women working in garment factories reported experiencing sexually harassing behaviour in the workplace over the last 12 months. Out of 180 workers in Bangladesh, interviewed for the Microfinance Opportunities/Fashion Revolution Garment Worker Diaries project in 2017, 60% reported gender-based discrimination, over 15% reported being threatened and 5% had been hit. More than one-third of countries around the world do not yet have any laws prohibiting sexual harassment at work, leaving nearly 235 million women vulnerable on a daily basis.

In Bangladesh, the new monthly minimum wage is 8000 taka ($95), which is half the 16,000 taka the legal representatives of 4.5 million garment workers are demanding in order to progress towards a living wage. Informal workers and homeworkers provide a huge, invisible workforce within fashion supply chains. In 2016, 61% of all workers globally were engaged in informal employment.

Worldwide, it’s estimated that 152 million children are engaged in forms of child labour, and while the International Labour Organization (ILO) has shown that this figure is on a downward trend, many children are still working within the garment supply chain. Any child working under the age of 15 is considered to be partaking in child labour. 48% of victims of child labour are just 5-11 years old. In many cases, this work can involve long hours, unsafe working conditions, and low wages - dangers that children are particularly vulnerable to

Cotton is one of the worst offenders when it comes to water consumption on an industrial scale. Cotton makes up approximately 30-40% of the clothing we wear and it can take 10,000 litres of water to produce just 1kg of cotton, equivalent to six typical t-shirts. Many of the countries in the world where cotton is grown are the places most at risk of the effects of climate change.

Another major issue is pollution from the wet processing of the textile industry. Wet processing is the scouring, bleaching, dyeing, printing and finishing of raw textiles. The Citarum River in Indonesia is home to around 2,000 textile factories where the effluent used for dyeing and processing fabric is dumped, with little or no regulation. Attempts to clean up the world’s most polluted river have been pointless as the authorities turn a blind eye to rogue factories. Pollution on this scale is a gross infringement of people’s human rights.

Research has shown that every time we wash our synthetic clothing, tiny particles of plastic called microfibres – too small to be caught by conventional water treatment – are being washed into our water systems, ending up in rivers, lakes and oceans. A truck load of plastic is thrown into the oceans every minute adding to the 12.7 million tonnes of plastic already polluting and suffocating marine life from the Arctic to the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands.

Due to the tiny size of microfibres, they can be ingested by marine animals, many of which end up as our food. Once ingested, they can cause gut blockage, physical injury, changes to oxygen levels in cells in the body, altered feeding behaviour and reduced energy levels, which impacts growth and reproduction. Due to this, the balance of whole ecosystems can be affected.

From raw material to disposal, the entire life cycle of our clothing produces climate impacts. It has been estimated that the fashion industry emits around 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2e a year, which equates to approximately 2-3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. If the fashion industry doesn’t change the way it currently operates, the industry’s CO2e emissions could increase by 60% by 2030. To achieve the SDGs, including keeping below the 2°C global temperature target, the fashion industry needs to take an active role in reducing its energy emissions. It has been estimated that an 80% industry-wide emissions cut by 2050 is needed to align the fashion industry’s emissions to the 2°C warming scenario. There is a lot of work to be done to achieve this, by all of us - citizens, businesses and governments alike.

In the last 15 years, clothing production has doubled and the number of times we wear those clothes is decreasing. If annual clothing sales continue to grow at the current rate, they will reach 160 million tonnes by 2050 – more than three times the volume we are producing today. In order to make these millions more items of clothing, most of which will be surplus to requirements, we will use 300 million tonnes of non-renewable materials that the Earth simply doesn’t have the resources to produce.

A large proportion of biodiversity loss occurs due to habitat change resulting from agriculture and the fashion industry is projected to use 35% more land for fibre production by 2030— an extra 115 million hectares that could be left to preserve biodiversity.

Forests play a critical role in mitigating climate breakdown because they act as a carbon sink, capturing CO2 that would otherwise be in our atmosphere. When forests are cleared or burnt, the stored carbon is released into the atmosphere, mainly as CO2. It is estimated that deforestation accounts for around 6-17% of global GHG emissions. The fashion industry has a key role to play in preventing deforestation and biodiversity loss: around 150 million trees are logged every year and turned into cellulosic fabrics – such as viscose.

Without them, most of our crops would fail since about three-quarters of all flowering plants are pollinated by insects. In addition, insects are at the bottom of the food web, eaten by birds, mammals and fish. If insect populations decline, everything else will as well. Currently, over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction due to intensive agriculture, insecticides, and pesticides. Although the cultivated area of cotton covers only 3% of the planet’s agricultural land, it uses 16% of all insecticides and 7% of all pesticides. Whilst some have been banned and replaced, many insecticides can kill or harm a broad spectrum of insects, including those that pollinate crops.

Soils are home to over a quarter of all living species on earth and their biodiversity plays a vital role in mitigating climate change and storing and purifying water [12]. The intensive agricultural processes used to produce raw materials and fibres used for the textile industry contributes to soil erosion and the loss of biodiversity within our soils.