LONDON — What’s Going On?
That’s what The Centre for Sustainable Fashion is looking to answer with a two-day conference marking its 10-year anniversary at London College of Fashion.
The conference, which began Wednesday, comes on the heels of an inquiry into fast fashion’s impact on the environment that was launched in June by the House of Commons’ environmental audit committee and chaired by Mary Creagh, a member of Parliament, who also opened the two-day event.
“The U.K. buys more clothes than any other European country and every year we dispose of 1.1 million tons of clothes and 80 percent of that goes into the landfill,” she said, pointing out her reason for opening the inquiry.
While waste is the industry’s most visible problem, Creagh also addressed the impact of microbeads, plastic packaging, microfibers in waste water and pollution resulting from production. “Fashion has a history of chasing the cheap needle around the globe and turning a blind eye to environmental degradation,” she said.
The committee is working on finding solutions to these problems, she said, citing the microbeads ban that passed in the U.K. earlier this year and calls for industry players to replace their linear model with a circular one.
Dr. Helen Crowley, head of sustainable sourcing innovation at Kering, provided
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