High Street Clothes Shops

What is the problem with fast fashion?

Over the last two years, there has been a dramatic growth in general awareness of the impacts that the clothing industry is having on the environment. This was shown by the Extinction Rebellion blockade of London Fashion Week in February 2019.

Estimates of the likely climate change impacts of clothing markets rise as high as 25% of all global emissions by 2050. Because of this, we have published an article on the Carbon Cost of Clothing. Current trends involve increasing the output of cheap and disposable fashion items. This is only making the problem of fashion and the environment worse. 

For example, the average consumer buys 60% more clothing than 15 years ago, while less than 1% of the material used to produce garments is recycled into new clothing. Although we have reported on the idea of ‘fast fashion’ before, a swathe of new reports has now been published. This seems to have culminated in a damning review by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee in early 2019. We explore all of this in more detail in our article ‘What is Fast Fashion and Why is it a Problem?’.

During our research into fast fashion companies Boohoo and Missguided, we noticed some strange company structures. The resulting article Clothing Companies and Tax Havens discusses who the best and worst performers are.

In the twenty years leading up to these new developments, fashion campaigners focused on sweatshop labour as a primary concern. And it's clear that the pressures of fast fashion are creating more and more problems for workers. In our Critical Workers’ Rights Issues article, we report on resistance to gender-based violence in garment factories, and the continued failure to provide a living wage for all workers.

Table highlights

Sustainability

It is estimated that around two-thirds of the climate impact over the lifetime of a garment occurs at the raw materials stage. We, therefore, marked some companies down on the Ethiscore table under Climate Change.

Companies lost half a mark for being named as ‘least engaged’ in the House of Common’s ‘Fixing Fashion 2019’ report (see our guide to fast fashion for more on this). They also lost half a mark if, in line with the 2019 Ethical Fashion Report produced by Baptist World Aid, they had not assessed the environmental impact of the top three fibres and materials they used and implemented these learnings into product design and production, and did not have at least 1% of their products made from ‘sustainable fibres’.

Toxic chemicals

One of the most pressing issues in the sector is the use of toxic chemicals. The chemicals are used in dyes, for cleaning and fireproofing, as antifungals, for water and stain-proofing, as solvents and as pigments. These hazardous chemicals have been found in effluent from supply chain manufacturers, in products and in the environment, despite decades of regulation and corporate responsibility programmes.

For local communities living near manufacturing facilities, water pollution has become a daily reality. Attempts to address this problem have typically involved setting and tightening the legal limits for the discharge and release of a relatively narrow range of hazardous chemicals

This ‘legalised pollution’ has not prevented the continuing release of toxic chemicals. But, for persistent, hazardous chemicals, like heavy metals, PFCs or phthalates, there is no ‘safe’ level.

How we rated the companies on toxic chemicals

• Companies in all the guides included in this issue lost a mark under Pollution & Toxics unless they had one of the following:
• They used 100% sustainably sourced materials (i.e. organic, recycled or cotton sourced under the Better Cotton Initiative,
• Were listed as a leader in the Greenpeace Detox campaign,
• Were a small company only selling sustainable, alternative clothing.
• If a company had a target for the zero discharge of hazardous chemicals or more than 50% of sustainably sourced materials, then it got our middle rating.

A company that had none of the above got our worst rating.

Only two companies on our table (Inditex and H&M) are highlighted by the Greenpeace Detox campaign as leading the industry to a toxic-free future, with “credible timelines, concrete actions and on-the-ground implementation”.

Workers’ Rights

The pressure to produce ever-faster also creates problems for workers in producer factories.

The situation is particularly bad in Bangladesh, where protests in 2018 against the minimum wage of less than half a dollar an hour, led to over 11,000 workers being fired. The Bangladesh Accord is now under threat too. This was set up after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013.

Also, out of that disaster came the excellent Fashion Revolution campaign. It has a website full of resources for taking action, from the hashtag #whomademyclothes to question brands on social media, to postcard templates for writing to policymakers.

Unusually for one of our guides, all the companies in this report lost marks in our Workers’ Rights category due to a wide range of campaign reports criticising clothing companies for the treatment of people in their supply chains. More details are available for logged-in subscribers on our website.

We also rated companies’ Supply Chain Management systems to see whether they addressed some of the key workers’ rights problems.

Animals

Companies were also assessed for Animal Rights (in relation to using animal products such as leather, merino wool, silk, goose and duck down angora or fur), and several lost marks for Animal Testing as they sold perfumes as well as clothes.

If they sold cosmetics they were also rated for their palm oil practices as palm derivatives are widely used in body care and makeup.

For the first time, perplexingly, we have discovered companies (including TK Maxx and Amazon) being criticised for using real fur labelled as fake!

Leather

We found that most companies in these guides sold leather items – either clothing, shoes or accessories like bags and belts. Aside from the obvious animal rights issue there, there are other problems with leather including pollution from toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, forced labour, and deforestation for cattle ranching.

Chemicals in tanning

One of the most polluting processes of leather production is the tanning phase - a process that uses toxic chemicals to turn animal skin into leather and stop it from decomposing.

One of the most problematic chemicals used is chromium. During the process, this produces a chemical by-product, hexavalent chromium, which is a known human carcinogen. Many other hazardous chemicals are used in the process including arsenic, heavy metals and cyanide.

According to the India Committee of the Netherlands’ report ‘Do Leather Workers Matter?’ in March 2017, all of these toxic chemicals have a negative effect on both the environment and the health of workers who often work in unregulated, unorganised small tanneries and workshops or are homeworkers.

The following companies received a worst rating for their use of leather:

• Inditex (Zara, Pull & Bear). They did have some policies regarding leather but they did not meet our criteria to get a middle or best. See their company profiles for details if needed.
• Boohoo and its subsidiaries (Pretty Little Thing, Nasty Gal). No leather policy was found.
• Missguided weren't marked down as all the products on their site advertised as leather were 'faux leather'.

How we rated the companies for leather

We asked companies if they had a policy on the use of leather, including how it is sourced and treated (e.g. covering pollution from tanneries and deforestation from cattle ranching). We used their responses or information taken from their websites to rate them in two areas: Animal Rights and Pollution & Toxics.

Companies that used leather got a Pollution & Toxics mark, unless they used organic or upcycled leather, natural vegetable dyes or if all their leather came from tanneries that are rated ‘Gold medal’ by the Leather Working Group.

Companies using leather are also marked down under Animal Rights.

For more on leather see our guide to furniture shops.
 

Other issues

A large number of companies also lost marks under Anti-Social Finance. For some of them, this was because we thought they were making excessive annual payments to directors. The worst payments were astonishing:

• GAP ($20 million)
• Amazon ($19 million)
• TK Maxx ($18 million)

When rates like this, which are nearly $10,000 per hour, are compared to the half dollar per hour received by workers in Bangladesh, the degree of brokenness in the system becomes apparent.

Other companies had tax havens in their corporate structures, and we look at this in more detail in our feature on clothing companies and tax havens.

On top of clothing-specific marks, some companies (such as Next and FatFace, both partly owned by large investment companies) lost extra marks for activities within their company group.

This also applied to supermarkets and other food companies which were marked down in the animals columns for selling meat products. This particularly affected three companies: M&S, Tesco and Primark. These companies otherwise did well in terms of being signed up to multi-stakeholder initiatives. See more about this and see who's in what initiative in our fashion workers' rights feature. 

Quick turn around 

Many of the high-street clothing retailers have adopted an approach to clothing production where turnaround times for it to be designed, manufactured and sold is achieved within weeks. Retailers can now react to changing trends, or the weather, at a drop of a hat.

This shift in production has also gone hand-in-hand with a reduction in prices. Apparently though, “consumers will spend more over a year with regular low cost ‘fashion fixes’ than on more exclusive pieces that they fall in love with and will treasure.”

Tamsin Lejeune from the Ethical Fashion Forum argues that for the retailers, it's all about how much clothing can be shifted and how quickly this can be done.

“Shifting product quickly means producing a lot of stuff at as low a price as possible, which puts pressure on suppliers to make huge volumes at a low price to tight deadlines. That pressure caused Rana Plaza in 2013.”

Businesses that prioritise their aim to maximise profits over an aim to produce clothing under conditions which are fair to the workers, environment and animals are the dilemma that faces many high-street retailers. The issue has been referred to as the ‘elephant in the room’ by campaigners when businesses are discussing sustainability without mentioning their actual business model.