Module
How fashion contributes to the climate crisis
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Redress
Quick Access
Learn more fashion industry terminology from the Glossary.
Quick Access
Learn more fashion industry terminology from the Glossary.
Fashion is one of the most glamourous industries in the world — but it’s one of the world’s most polluting industries too, generating a large amount of greenhouse gas pollution. This pollution directly affects our climate: the planet is warming up on land and in the oceans, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather such as typhoons, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods are accelerating. We are now in a climate crisis.
In this module, we’ll look into how exactly fashion contributes to the climate crisis. We will learn more about how climate issues affect both people and our planet, why they are happening, and how, as consumers, we can do our part to slow the crisis down.
- Our climate is getting warmer!
Over the millennia that our planet has existed, the earth’s climate has naturally changed, with different shifts in temperature and weather. But in the last century, scientists have discovered that the earth’s climate has changed faster and more than usual. It’s getting warmer, and that’s because of us humans. We are now experiencing what we call a climate crisis, and everyone can feel it, from people to animals and plants. The ocean temperature is increasing, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather such as typhoons, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and floods are happening everywhere!
Extreme weather
Extreme weather conditions are causing widespread problems to our daily lives. No one is exempted from it and we are all suffering from its negative impact.
Global warming has impacted temperatures all over the globe. In Hong Kong, over the last hundred years or so, the numbers of hot nights and very hot days have increased while the number of cold days has decreased.1 Global warming is also impacting the sea surface temperature in our oceans, keeping them warm for a longer period of time in the year. This provides enough energy for tropical cyclones to form.
Credit: The Standard and China Daily
The weather we experience has intensified, for example in Hong Kong with several Signal 10 typhoons since 2010. Nowadays, typhoon season is stretching further into October and November, which was a rare case 20 years ago. Big typhoons often bring along heavy rainfall and flash flooding. Streets, shopping malls, underground parking lots, and metro stations end up submerged in rainwater and trapping drivers on roads. Authorities have to suspend school and urge the public to seek safe shelter. No school, no work, no shopping — everything halts.
Flash flood in the US in 2025. Credit: Northeastern University College of Science.
Global warming also impacts rain patterns across the world.
Heavy or excessive rainfall in a short period of time causes more frequent flash floods, and they tend to be disastrous. Flash floods result in raging torrents that rip through river beds, urban streets, or mountain canyons, sweeping everything before them.
In some drier countries, it’s a different story. Global warming there means not enough rainfall, which results in droughts.
The impact on communities
Climate change threatens everyone and we are starting to experience the negative impact of such results. According to the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Asia is hit hardest by climate change.2 The region is heating up faster than the global average, and it’s impacting many communities. In 2023, floods and storms in Asia resulted in over 2,000 deaths and affected over 9 million people.
Our lifestyles are heavily influenced by the climate crisis, and it comes at a destructive cost to our infrastructure. Changes in climate and weather patterns especially affects vulnerable farmers who may lose the ability to grow crops like vegetables or cotton, and therefore lose their income. It will be hard to maintain crop yield if weather patterns continue to worsen. With farm lands flooded or in drought, crops die and the supply chain is broken. Our food, our clothes, and our land are suffering the results of the human-intensified climate crisis.
This is a worrying situation for the future, including for the fashion industry, as it may reduce and compromise the quality and quantity of the raw materials we can get from farming.
- Why is the planet warming up?
Our planet is suffocating in greenhouse gases
Our climate is getting hotter because too many greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases wrap around the planet like a blanket, making it hotter and hotter, trapping heat from the sun. Until recently, these greenhouse gases have been keeping the earth warm enough to live on, but now it’s become too much.
Credit: NOAA Climate Program Office, Graphic by Anna Eshelman.
來源:NOAA Climate Program Office, Graphic by Anna Eshelman
来源:NOAA Climate Program Office, Graphic by Anna Eshelman
So where do these greenhouse gases come from?
Greenhouse gases are released into our atmosphere when:
- we burn fossil fuels, like oil or coal, for energy (also known as dirty energy)
- we clear land and cut down forests (i.e. deforestation)
we send waste to landfills
Climate crisis = Greenhouse gases = Burning dirty energy + Deforestation + Waste
Most people on earth are accountable for contributing to climate change as well, because our modern lifestyles heavily rely on:
- energy, usually created by burning fossil fuels for driving, washing clothes, and air conditioning in the summer
- land use, for example to grow crops for food, or to make clothes or furniture
- landfills, to get rid of our individual waste every day
Fashion’s invisible release of greenhouse gas
In the past two decades, the fashion industry boomed and clothing consumption roughly doubled.3 While this growth has increased access to affordable clothing, it has also led to a decline in garment usage longevity. Consumers frequently buy and discard perfectly wearable and often still new clothes as new trends emerge. This cycle of buying and discarding clothing greatly increases carbon emissions, accelerating existing environmental concerns.
Credit: Ellen MacArthur Foundation
來源:Ellen MacArthur Foundation
来源:Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Fashion burns fossil fuels
First, what are fossil fuels? Fossil fuels are the product of decomposition of organisms — plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. The procedure happens deep under Earth’s crust and over millions of years as heat and pressure from thick layers of rocks help to change the decayed organic remains into fossil fuels. These fuels include oil, coal, and natural gas.
Credit: U.S. Energy Information Administration
來源: U.S. Energy Information Administration
来源: U.S. Energy Information Administration
Let’s discover how the fashion industry uses a lot of fossil fuels.
Credit: AYA (2023). ‘How Fast Fashion & (Recycled) Polyester Create The Microplastics In Our Blood’. YouTube.
One of the primary causes of GHG emissions in the fashion industry is fabric production, and in particular, the production of synthetic fabrics like polyester. These synthetic fabrics are made from petroleum, a fossil fuel, that has to be burnt to produce plastic filaments before it can be transformed into a fabric. That’s right, synthetics fibres are nothing less than a type of plastic. Nowadays, polyester is the most commonly used material in our clothes.4 These synthetic fabrics are widely used because of their durability, affordability, and ability to retain shape, but also because it is quite cheap to produce.
Oil, another fossil fuel, is also in heavy demand to generate energy used for manufacturing, shipping, and retailing. The convenience of globalisation and online shopping becoming a prominent part of our current lifestyle comes at the cost of our oil and energy consumption.
Finally, when clothes are in our possession, we consume energy just to keep them clean and hygienic. Washing and drying clothes also generate greenhouse gases. Between electricity and hot water, a washer and dryer can account for about 10 percent of total energy use in your home.5
Go deeper about oil and fashion here.
Fashion cuts down trees
Trees are super important to keep our air clean. Trees are what we call ‘carbon-sinks’: they trap and absorb accumulated greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere. Deforestation (cutting down trees) leads to greenhouse gas emissions in two ways:
- First, when trees are cut down or burnt, we are losing those precious ‘carbon sinks’. This means we are no longer able to absorb the pollution from the atmosphere.
- Second, when we cut down or burn trees, the accumulated greenhouse gas that was stored into the trees gets released into the atmosphere. This creates even more pollution.
Credit: NRDC
Why does fashion need to cut down trees? Firstly, to clear land in order to produce fibres, from plants such as cotton or to raise animals in order to harvest their wool. Secondly trees can be processed into wood pulp from which the viscose fiber is created. Each year, more than 300 million trees are cut down, many from the most vital forest ecosystems, to create fabrics for things like T-shirts, dresses, and home textiles. If placed end-to-end, those trees would circle the earth seven times.6
Fashion creates waste
At the end of their life, our clothes usually end up in landfills. They can take a long time to degrade in landfills. During this process, clothes release greenhouse gases and other harmful pollutants into the air and land.
Credit: Scholastic Science World, ‘Fast Fashion Graveyard’ (MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Globally, one rubbish truck of textiles is either burned or sent to landfill every second.7 And in Hong Kong, an average daily quantity of 402 tonnes of textiles were landfilled in 2023!8 This is the equivalent of 17,480 suitcases of textiles landfilled every day.9
Learn more about fashion and the use of our land here.
- Circular fashion can fight the climate crisis
Governments and industry efforts
Leading a sustainable lifestyle means that we are meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This mentality and way of life is critically important when it comes to fighting the climate crisis.
In 2015, most countries of the world signed the Paris Agreement, an international treaty aimed to prevent irreversible climate change by limiting global warming to well below an increase of 2 degrees Celsius. Although not a country, the global fashion industry also has a role to play. To stay within the limits of the Paris Agreement, by 2030, the industry would need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45%. Unfortunately, if the fashion industry continues on as it does today, its greenhouse gas emissions are projected to increase 42% by 2030.10
By understanding the impact that clothes production and consumption have on the environment, we can start reconsidering our habits and make a change. Today’s fashion system emits so much greenhouse gas because it is following a LINEAR system, where we TAKE finite resources from nature as if they were unlimited, we MAKE clothing generating a lot of pollution, we USE clothes for a short period of time, and finally WASTE them by throwing them away.
But this doesn’t have to be what the future looks like. To reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, fashion manufacturers and consumers can take on many different steps. An important one is to change from the LINEAR system to a CIRCULAR one. Let’s have a closer look at what this means.
What is circular fashion?
In the circular system, materials never become waste, nature is regenerated11, and responsibility is taken for the product’s entire lifecycle and its impact on the planet. In practice, going from a LINEAR to a CIRCULAR fashion system means to:
- REGENERATE nature, i.e. be kind to our nature instead of taking too many natural resources when sourcing materials for clothes
- MAKE clothes in ways that do not create waste and pollution
- USE and REUSE clothes for as long as possible
- and finally RECYCLE clothes when they can no longer serve their purpose.
Consumer efforts
As consumers, we have the power to change how we USE and REUSE clothes.
Credit: Redress
來源: Redress
来源: Redress
Circular fashion is a solution that will help you extend the life of your clothes by:
- Caring: wash your clothes properly according to the directions in your care labels, sort delicate items away from heavy items and wash them separately, flip your clothes inside out before putting them into the laundry
- Repairing: use simple sewing skills to fix loose or fallen-off buttons and sew seams that have torn apart
- Altering: fix the size of items that are either too small or too big for you — the most common alteration is to adjust the length of jeans or trousers
- Giving away: when you have outgrown your own clothes, consider giving them to a younger sibling or a trusted charity with an environmental purpose
- Reselling: selling your used clothes or accessories online is a popular trend — you can make money from your used clothes
- Renting: consider renting for one-off events like prom, graduation, costumed events, and weddings
The more usage we get out of the clothing items we already have, the more valuable are the resources, energy, and human effort that went into the making of each piece. By choosing to use what we have instead of buying new clothes, we reduce the overconsumption of unnecessary items.
QUICK TIPS
- The climate crisis seems like a big thing, but it’s something we can all keep learning about. We particularly like the resources from NASA Climate Kids.
- Look out for our next Get Redressed campaign where you can participate in Hong Kong’s largest clothing collection and consumer education experience.
Footnotes
1 Hong Kong Observatory, ‘Climate Change in Hong Kong’
2 World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), 2024, Climate change and extreme weather impacts hit Asia hard
3 Global Fashion Agenda & The Boston Consulting Group (2017), The Pulse of the Fashion Industry. Global apparel, footwear consumption may rise by 63% in 2030.
4 Textiles Exchange, ‘Materials Market Report 2024’
5 Central Hudson, ‘10 Tips to Save Energy in the Laundry Room’
6 Canopy (2024), Style shouldn’t cost the Earth
7 Ellen MacArthur Foundation, A new textiles economy: Redesigning fashion’s future (2017)
8 Environmental Protection Department, HKSAR. 2023. Monitoring of Solid Waste in Hong Kong: Waste Statistics for 2022.
9 Estimation by Redress, based on a 23kg suitcase.
10 Apparel Impact Institute (2023), Taking Stock of Progress Against the Roadmap to Net Zero
11 Ellen MacArthur Foundation – What is a circular economy?