People across the globe first started to consider a path of sustainable development back in the 1970s.
Sustainable development is a process that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It was only by 2015 that a total of 17 goals were shaped and a policy adopted to achieve comprehensive sustainability in business through 2030. Here’s a look at the emerging eco-trends as well as brands that can actually be called eco-friendly.
The circular economy is a close-loop model which involves the use of production waste for producing a subsequent product. An example of this approach is the MUD Jeans sustainable brand, which is considered as totally eco-friendly. Jeans are made from organic and recycled materials; consumers can borrow them for a period of one year and then return or buy them out.
Another trend, upcycling, is the process of re-using products to modify them, such as fabric or product fragments snippets used without fully processing them into fiber. Two St. Petersburg-based brands — Fair Labels and Sila Svitera (Sweater Power) — make their products from used materials.
Recycling involves processing of waste into finished products such as plastic, clothing and others. Clothing brands that utilize this method include Adidas, which uses ocean plastic to produce sneakers, and Veja, which makes sneakers from plastic bottles and rubber harvested in the Amazon forest. You can visit the companies’ respective sites to see their products.
Carbon neutrality is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. This can be achieved in two ways: using technologies that reduce CO2 emissions or investing in eco-projects such as planting trees, optimizing agriculture, and others. This method produces results, albeit rather unspecific: it is not always possible to accurately calculate the amount of the reduction in emissions, whose compensation is often overestimated, with strict regulations for the procedure.
The brands that have chosen to follow this trend include large companies that can afford such expenses: for instance, H&M Group has committed to becoming climate positive by 2040, while Burberry, Prada, Michael Kors, Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Hermès, Chanel, Adidas, Nike, Puma, and Zara have opted to minimize their environmental impact, including efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Virtual clothing is a trend of both the present and the future. Collaborations by designers such as Ralph Lauren and Snapchat open up new prospects for communication with a wider range of consumers, offering such services as virtual displays and virtual fitting rooms.
Luxury fashion house Dolce & Gabbana has ditched natural fur only this year, while such brands such as Calvin Klein, Versace, Tommy Hilfiger and many others abandoned fur a while ago; soon, most fashion designers across the globe will be phasing out natural leather in their collections.
Most methods utilized by fashion giants prove efficient as marketing strategies, yet it is too early to talk about a complete solution to problems in this area. While producing clothes from bottles would seem a good recycling option, it is much better to make bottles from bottles and over again — because clothes produced from bottles are much more difficult to recycle for clothing.
Currently, local brands are more efficient in minimizing their environmental impact, and for obvious reasons: firstly, due to a smaller amount of manufactured products, and secondly, due to locally placed production facilities and far simpler supply chains.
Corporations have to make more effort in this regard because companies’ complex internal structure, as well as production facilities and consumers located in different countries, volumes of collections and many related factors, plus involvement of different people with different views in the production process (depending on the country) do not make this work easier. Yet, in general, sustainable development is the sole way of advancement in our post-industrial world.
By Anastasia Zinchenko, Master of Environment and Natural Resources Management, eco-stylist