Last week our founder attended an event at the carbon trust honing in on sustainable strategies and education of our customers how brands are changing and developing their sustainable strategies.
At the moment greenhouse gases are accounted in three different ways for fashion. The first via direct emissions for example any fuels you use. The second is the embodied emissions, this is typically purchased energy like electricity and the third is everything else in your value chain, the embodied carbon upstream in your products and downstream emissions from using your products.
Now, what is the most polluting stage in a garments lifecycle? In the steps below we can see that ‘material production’ is the most polluting stage, it’s also good to remember that silk, wool and leather are more heavily concentrated in raw materials.
So, what is the best way to reduce our environmental footprint within this industry for both brands and consumers, minimising waste overall is a good place to start, including manufacturing techniques to reduce waste and zero-waste pattern cutting. Keeping garments and materials in use and materials which are circular by design.