Fast Fashion Brand Fabric "Wash Green" Breaks Through The Eyebrows To Seek Possible Balance.

Recently, the fast fashion giant H&M announced that it will produce 1 million euros a year to promote the technology development of clothing recycling.

This reminds me of the brand CEO Karl-Johan Persson's announcement earlier this year when it announced the brand's "2014 sustainability report": "in order to ensure success in business, we must constantly develop while respecting the earth's limits (Planetary Boundaries, which means environmental safety limits)."

Recycling clothing, sustainability, earth limits...

It sounds really good, the old clothes are effectively recycled to achieve environmental friendliness, brand reputation and consumer recognition three parties benefit.

The reality is always cruel. Ironically, before the announcement of H&M's increase in the development plan, Newsweek launched a blockbuster cover story in August 21st.

Uniqlo, Zara, Wal-Mart and Gap, the fast fashion brand factories, caused disastrous pollution to Tiruba, a small town in southern India, and the harm to local residents.

The news media, which is always vigilant against these fast fashion brands, named the five thousand word article "poisonous fashion".

Fashion and environmental protection seem to be a group of natural paradoxes, let alone the fast fashion industry with rapid product iteration and high energy consumption.

Nowadays, the speed of fast fashion brands' upgrading has crossed the "season" scale and is moving towards the amazing speed of "Zhou".

Zara today's new product development cycle is only 5-15 days, with an average of more than 200 new launches per week.

As a huge and complex industrial chain with lots of resources, fast fashion is a huge source of energy and resources, and a high pollution that is hard to ignore.

Fast fashion's "original sin"

"We are really trying to ensure that our products convey positive information, both at the social level and the environmental level, and their negative impact is lower than that of our competitors."

Henrik Lampa, H&M brand's environmental sustainability manager, said in an interview with Quartz, "we must adopt a systematic plan for this purpose.

But in this long process, the use of resources is always closely related to the negative impact.

If the number of 20000 new models of clothing on Zara has been jawed every year, it is hard to imagine how much H&M factory can produce at least 600 million products a year.

The H&M brand has more than 3200 stores in 55 countries around the world.

If you count the sub card like COS, then this number will turn into 3500 shops. Don't forget, H&M is expanding at a rate of 10% to 15% every year.

Just imagine how much cotton, electricity and water needed to meet the huge production demand of the factory.

And even if we explore every year on the road of environmental protection, there is no doubt that this fast fashion giant is far from the real environmental sustainability.

According to the most frequently cited H&M

The company claims that Textile Exchange, a non-profit organization, has certified H&M as the world's leading enterprise for organic cotton.

Organic cotton has less impact on the environment and reduces the use of pesticides that may cause cancer.

But in fact, only 13.7% of cotton used by H&M is organic cotton.

In most cases, a large number of resource consuming crops, whether organic or inorganic, are the bloody truth hidden behind these data.

Fast fashion has complex industrial chains, involving many complicated links.

Negative effects also occur after clothing sales. Fast fashion promotes the development of modern consumer culture, and constantly guides people to buy more and more clothes, whether they really need it or not.

Inevitably, the final destination of those extra clothes can only be landfills.

In the United States alone, ten million and five hundred thousand clothes enter landfill every year, and even natural fibers are not easily degraded.

It's good to use organic cotton instead of traditional cotton, but even if you use organic cotton, every time you produce a T-shirt or a pair of jeans, you still need to spend more than twenty thousand litres of water.

You know: a landfill filled with organic cotton is always a crammed landfill.

Seeking possible balance

"Environmental unfriendliness" has been criticized by the fast fashion industry.

Putting green into the direction of brand development in order to reverse the negative impression of the public sounds too much like a marketing tool for the public and environmentalists, so that the public will look at it and question it, calling it "green washing".

To be honest, the suggestion that consumers should change their consumption concept is merely "very beautiful", which is no less difficult than letting people truly admit that "money is not so important".

Under the shadow of consumer culture, "buy and buy" is an inevitable fate.

Seeking a balance between fast fashion and environmental protection under the existing framework may be a possibility to break the "original sin".

In recent years, many of them are represented by H&M.

All of them went to the "green washing" road without exception.

Puma has launched a reliable biodegradable In Cycle series. UNIQLO has launched a full product recycling program. The parent company of Zara, Inditex, has built more than more than 1300 eco stores worldwide since 2007.

Exploration and attempt never stop.

In 2012, Esprit began developing self recycling system for waste regeneration.

Mixing 20% of the waste material with 80% of the new fabric produces the same quality of the T-shirt as that of the new fabric.

At the same time, the brand is recycled with a certain proportion of polyester PET plastic, the final product has also achieved satisfactory results.

H&M is also doing the same thing: the old clothes recycling project has been running for some time, and you can see the eye-catching old clothes recycling logo in the stores.

According to the annual report of the brand in 2014, the number of products made from old clothes collected from customers' wardrobe has increased by 300%.

Even to a certain extent, environmental protection is an excellent marketing tool to help a brand to establish its own image, but from this perspective, if fashion and environmental protection are doomed to be paradoxical, then a delicate balance can be found under the logic of fast fashion industry itself, and it will also be memorable progress.