Landmark treaty on plastic pollution must put scientific evidence front and center
Textiles fit into two broad categories: natural and synthetic. The production of those such as cotton and wool, which are made from plant and animal sources, is largely stable, albeit slowly increasing. By contrast, the production of polymer-based fibres, particularly polyester, raced ahead from about 25 million tonnes a year in 2000 to some 65 million tonnes in 2018, according to the NIST workshop report. Taken together, these trends are having a staggering environmental impact.
Take water. The fashion industry, one of the world’s largest users of water, consumes anywhere from 20 trillion to 200 trillion litres every year. Then there are microplastics. Plastic fibres are released when we wash polyester and other polymer-based textiles, and make up between 20% and 35% of the microplastics choking the oceans. Added to this are specific chemicals, such as those used to make fabrics stain resistant and the pesticides required to protect crops such as cotton.
Change is sorely needed, but will require the fashion industry to work harder to embrace more of what is known as the circular economy. That will involve at least two things: refocusing on making things that last, and so encouraging reuse; and more rapidly expanding the technologies for sustainable manufacturing processes, especially recycling. There’s a big role for research — both academic and industrial — in achieving these and other ambitions.
Researchers could begin by helping to provide more accurate estimates of water use. It must surely be possible to narrow the range between 20 trillion and 200 trillion litres of water. There is also work to be done on improving and expanding textiles recycling. Overwhelmingly, used textiles go to landfill (in the United States, the proportion is around 85%), in part because there are relatively few systems (at scale) that collect, recycle and reuse materials. Such recycling requires the manual separation of fibres, as well as buttons and zips. Different fibres are not easy to identify by eye, and overall such manual processes are time-consuming. Machinery is being developed that can help. Technologies also exist to recycle used fibres chemically and to create high-quality fibres that can be reused in clothing. But these are nowhere near the scale needed.
Another challenge for researchers is to work out how to get consumers and manufacturers to change their behaviour. This is already an active area of study in the social and behavioural sciences. For example, Verena Tiefenbeck at Bonn University in Germany and her colleagues found that when hotel guests were shown real-time feedback on the energy used in taking a shower, it cut down energy consumption from showering by 11.4%1. Other research questions include finding ways to encourage people to purchase durable goods; exploring how to satisfy cravings for something new while reducing environmental impact; and understanding why certain interventions can be successfully scaled up whereas others fail.
There are also schemes in other fields that could be a source of ideas. The World Health Organization has considerable experience where accessibility is concerned, for example, in its Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Through this, companies and governments agree the principles of sharing key technologies in diagnostics and drug development. And in the early 2000s, the Rockefeller Foundation, under its then-president Gordon Conway, an ecologist now at Imperial College London, made a big push to encourage companies to share technologies in agricultural biotechnology, by establishing the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. These schemes are not perfect and are continually evolving, but offer ideas and lessons that should be studied and considered.
