“Faced with pollution from the textile industry, we must buy as few clothes as possible”

How to dress without destroying the climate and environment? Polluting crops, energy-intensive factories, mountains of discarded clothes… less represented in the global warming debate than air travel, the textile industry still collects as many greenhouse gases as air transport, accounting for 2% to 4% of the total. global emissions – not to mention its other impacts on the environment and biodiversity.

More than 100 billion pieces of clothing are sold per person per year worldwide, or 10 kilos of clothing in France: this episode of the Human Warmth podcast, broadcast on the website. the world On October 4, entrepreneur Julia Fore will give a speech. Co-founder of the clothing brand Loom, he participates in the collective En mode climat, a movement of companies in the sector that wants to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fashion. She’s plain-spoken when it comes to clothes: “Buy as little as possible”

What emits greenhouse gases in the textile industry? Where does the problem come from?

In fashion, individually, each piece of clothing pollutes relatively little because it takes relatively little energy to produce a t-shirt, it takes relatively little pesticide to grow 200 grams of cotton to make that t-shirt, and relatively few chemicals are used to dye it. T-shirt. It has nothing to do with, for example, what it takes to manufacture an iPhone. The real problem with fashion is quantity: we make a lot of clothes. To give you an idea, in France alone, 2.5 billion pieces of clothing are sold on the market every year. That’s more than selling six egg cartons. Currently in our world we use clothes as if they were eggs. We break it, make an omelet and then buy more.

This brings us back to ‘fast fashion’, with brands mass-producing in low-cost countries, but what is polluting in the process? Production way? energy used? transportation?

The share of transport in the carbon impact of textiles is quite low, around 2%, for the same reason that the individual carbon weight of clothing is quite low. The shirt is very light, takes up very little space, the transport of the container is very optimized. One might think that the raw materials emit a lot of greenhouse gases: cotton, polyester. But in the end, it does not represent more than 30% of the carbon weight of the garment.