Why Fashion Needs to ‘Double Down’ on Reducing Virgin Synthetics
One way to help the fashion industry reduce its emissions in line with the 1.5-degree Celsius pathway? Making the right material choices, according to Textile Exchange.
But this may be easier said than done. On Friday, the sustainable trade group unveiled the 10th edition of its annual Materials Market Report, a snapshot of global raw material production that shows a need to “double down” on efforts to curtail the use of virgin fossil-fuel-based inputs while investing in strategies that decouple value creation from the extraction of new resources, said Claire Bergkamp, its CEO.
More from Sourcing Journal
The numbers speak for themselves: Between 2021 and 2022, global fiber production increased from 112 million metric tons to a “record” 116 million metric tons. In a business-as-usual scenario, it’s expected to surge to 147 million metric tons by 2030.
While the percentage of natural fibers produced through sustainable schemes showed a mild improvement—cotton recognized by the 2025 Sustainable Cotton Challenge, for instance, climbed from 25 percent in 2021 to 27 percent in 2021, and wool produced according to the Responsible Wool Standard, ZQ, SustainaWool and Climate Beneficial programs edged up from 3 percent in 2021 to 4.3 percent in 2022, the generation of virgin fossil-based synthetic fibers also rose from 63 million metric tons in 2021 to 67 million metric tons in 2022, accounting for 65 percent of global fiber production. Polyester continues to be the world’s most widely produced fiber with a 54 percent slice of the market as of 2022.
The combined share of all recycled fibers also broke its years-long streak by dropping from 8.5 percent in 2022 to 7.9 percent in 2022—a result, the report said, of the erosion of recycled polyester’s market share, which slid from 15 percent in 2021 to 14 percent in 2022, in part due the heightened competition for the PET bottles that make up 99 percent of the material’s feedstock and in part because of the challenges in scaling up textile-to-textile recycling. Last year, fewer than 1 percent of the world’s fibers stemmed from pre- and post-consumer recycled textiles.
“In general, we’re not seeing the massive upticks in materials we consider preferred as a percentage of overall production,” said Beth Jensen, director of Climate+ impact at Textile Exchange, which co-authored a study last month warning that the demand for low-climate-impact raw materials could exceed supply by as much as 133 million tons by 2030. The purpose of the report, she said, was to “get the message” through to executives about the longer-term risks of the industry’s glacial progress in the area, including potential financial penalties from the new wave of regulatory scrutiny.
The Materials Market Report carries a similarly urgent message. “The report illustrates the need to invest now in the building blocks that create a stable and sustainable supply of preferred materials, like getting to know your suppliers and working together,” Jensen said. “This action is truly needed now because the deadlines on industry targets are coming up quickly, as well as the introduction of new legislation.”
Changing tack isn’t as simple as it sounds. Fiber sourcing is complicated by byzantine supply chains, geopolitical volatility, threats of human rights abuses—forced labor included—and weather-related turmoil. Textile Exchange has developed tools to help companies make better choices, the most recent of which is its Materials Directory, which it bills as a “unique, filterable online repository for raw material suppliers, production units and branded materials used in the fashion, textile and apparel industry.” Its goal is to help businesses suss out raw material suppliers and their offerings through interactive maps.
At the Textile Exchange conference in London in October, the group also introduced the rejiggered Materials Impact Explorer (MIE), formerly known as the Global Fiber Impact Explorer and initially developed by Google, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Stella McCartney. Powered using Google Cloud, NGIS’s geospatial intelligence and WWF’s conservation expertise, the MIE is a free-to-use risk-assessment tool that provides users with an understanding of the hotspots within different sourcing locations, along with opportunities for action to mitigate those risks.
“It includes 163 different unique datasets—publicly available, national datasets that get updated regularly—that enter the algorithm, which [then] spits out a risk rating based on the material sourcing locations that are entered into the tool,” Jensen said of the tool, which covers climate, biodiversity and freshwater for starters, and will later include air pollution and forests. “This is the first risk-assessment tool designed specifically with our sector in mind.”
Textile Exchange also recently spruced up its Preferred Fiber and Materials Matrix, an interactive platform that assesses the performance of different sustainability standards across 80 indicators. The latest version includes revised methodologies for impact categories such as climate, water, chemicals, land, resource use and waste, biodiversity, human rights and animal welfare, as well as something called “initiative integrity,” which measures a given standard system’s robustness and governance.
In London, Carrie Freiman Parry, senior director of sustainability at Reformation, pointed out that while a wealth of tools is now available for brands to achieve visibility into raw material production—in short, Tier 4—many companies are also only starting “on that journey.”
“What’s most critical is how the knowledge is actually going to be used and what impact it’s going to have,” she said. “And I feel like it doesn’t only require Tier 4 traceability, but it also will be based on direct relationships with farmers and fiber producers, so you can work together on the opportunities identified.”
Speaking at the United Nations climate conference known as COP28 at the close of the week, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres insisted that the burning of fossil fuels must halt completely.
“We cannot save a burning planet with a fire hose of fossil fuels,” Guterres told the audience in Dubai. “The 1.5-degree limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce. Not abate. I urge governments to help industry make the right choice—by regulating, legislating, putting a fair price on carbon, ending fossil fuel subsidies and adopting a windfall tax on profits.”
Solve the daily Crossword
