Demand for cheap garments is also leading to poor working conditions and exploitation in global supply chains, the Environmental Audit Committee was told. Campaigners estimate some 25 million people globally were estimated to be trapped in forced labour in 2016.
"Consumers in the UK are getting pleasure and enjoyment from fashion and that is coming at a cost to workers and the environment," said Mark Sumner, a lecturer in fashion and sustainability at the University of Leeds.
Global clothing sales have boomed in the last two decades, driven by fast-changing fashion trends, but this has resulted in people wearing each item far fewer times before throwing it away, a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found.
Textile production emits 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined, it said, with less than 1 percent of unwanted clothes being recycled. Clothes release half a million tonnes of plastic microfibres into the ocean every year, equivalent to more than 50 billion plastic bottles, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
"We are finding synthetic materials - plastics but particularly fibres - in the deep sea, in Arctic sea ice, in fishing shellfish," said Richard Thompson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Plymouth..
Alan Wheeler, head of Britain's Textile Recycling Association, a trade group, said, "I would like to see producers, retailers, being made in some way to take more responsibility for the clothing that they are putting on the market."
http://news.trust.org/item/20181030210120-kuhzh/
"Consumers in the UK are getting pleasure and enjoyment from fashion and that is coming at a cost to workers and the environment," said Mark Sumner, a lecturer in fashion and sustainability at the University of Leeds.
Global clothing sales have boomed in the last two decades, driven by fast-changing fashion trends, but this has resulted in people wearing each item far fewer times before throwing it away, a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found.
Textile production emits 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined, it said, with less than 1 percent of unwanted clothes being recycled. Clothes release half a million tonnes of plastic microfibres into the ocean every year, equivalent to more than 50 billion plastic bottles, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
"We are finding synthetic materials - plastics but particularly fibres - in the deep sea, in Arctic sea ice, in fishing shellfish," said Richard Thompson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Plymouth..
Alan Wheeler, head of Britain's Textile Recycling Association, a trade group, said, "I would like to see producers, retailers, being made in some way to take more responsibility for the clothing that they are putting on the market."
http://news.trust.org/item/20181030210120-kuhzh/
No comments:
Post a Comment