As one of the world’s most polluting industries responsible for around 10 percent of global carbon emissions and 20 percent of all industrial water pollution, the fashion industry has increasingly come under scrutiny for its environmental practices (or lack thereof). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, sustainability was one of the buzziest terms in fashion last year. Almost 5 million posts with the hashtag sustainability on Instagram alone are a testimony to this, as is the fact that google searches for “sustainable fashion” increased by 61 percent in the past four years.
Sustainability-focused direct-to-consumer brands have profited from this interest, with a sales increase of 450 percent between 2016 and 2018.
These developments have not gone unnoticed, with big fashion conglomerates such as Inditex and Nike announcing sustainability initiatives last year. Sustainability, it seems, has finally entered the fashion mainstream.
Yet when looking beyond the headlines, many of those buzzy campaigns reveal a lack of real world impact. Nike’s much celebrated announcement to switch toward green energy in its production facilities quickly becomes less impressive when realizing that 90 percent of the brand’s carbon footprint is made up of facilities that Nike neither owns nor operates.
The complexity of the fashion supply chain — which theoretically entails

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