By Lianne Kolirin
The campaign against fast fashion should be a priority for conscientious consumers who have a faith, according to the ethical influencer Laura Young.
Ms Young, or Less Waste Laura as she is known to her tens of thousands of social media followers, describes herself as a climate activist, environmental scientist — and a Christian.
Caring for the environment is not just about recycling bottles and using sustainable modes of transport, but also about how we dress, she told the Religion Media Centre.
“Fashion has a huge impact on the planet,” she said. Most of our clothes are made with plastic. “Lots of microfibres come out when we wash our clothes. Then you have to look at the manufacturing and production processes and all the toxic dyes and chemicals that are released.”
The nature of fashion may be here today, gone tomorrow, but the environmental impact has surged though over-consumption in recent years. Up to 8 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the clothing and textile industry, while 215 trillion litres of water are consumed by the industry every year, according to the United Nations Alliance for Sustainable Fashion.
The British public buys more clothes per person than in any other country in Europe and five times more than we were during the 1980s, according to government research.
One kilogram of cotton, roughly equivalent to the weight of a shirt and a pair of jeans, can take as much as 20,000 litres of water to produce, according to the 2019 House of Commons report, Fixing Fashion: Clothing Consumption and Sustainability.
The report revealed that the fashion industry was projected to use 35 per cent more land for fibre production by 2030 — an extra 115 million hectares (284 million acres) that could be used to grow crops or preserve forest to store carbon.
Yet research carried out last year by Tearfund, a Christian charity that partners with churches in more than 50 of the world’s poorest countries, showed that the issue was not deemed of particular concern to Christians in this country.
A survey for the charity by Savanta ComRes in January 2022 showed that 22 per cent — less than a quarter — of Christians said their faith would motivate them to buy clothing with a low environmental impact.
Last year Tearfund launched the Great Fashion Fast to raise awareness of the issue and to encourage consumers to think more environmentally about their fashion choices. The initiative also sought to raise funds for the charity’s climate change work by encouraging participants to get sponsored to wear just ten items over a set timeframe.
“It was the focus for us last year but it’s still live and people can still sign up for it,” said Dr Ruth Valerio, the global advocacy and influencing director for Tearfund and canon theologian at Rochester Cathedral.
Addressing this issue should be of vital importance to Christians, she added. “The fashion industry is hugely damaging to the wider natural world and damaging to people. It can cause harm to people living in poverty through things like pollution in the manufacturing process, through lack of protection for workers from machines or chemicals or employment terms.
“It’s an essential part of the Christian calling to be taking care of people living in nature and poverty and taking positive action. Part of what we do with our UK supporters is look at how our lifestyle choices can contribute or help the climate crisis and fast fashion is one of those issues.
“One of the biggest messages is to buy less which costs less. Buy second-hand and do clothes-swaps. We can be cutting down the amount that we buy by just a few choice things that we keep, we look after, we mend, we wear for years and we can be supporting charities by passing our clothes on to them and by buying second-hand so it’s not in competition. This really works well with the cost-of-living crisis that we’re all facing.”
Progress has been made, Dr Valerio admitted, but not enough. “There’s still a huge amount to do and aspects where the fashion industry can take more responsibility,” she added. “I think it’s really important through all of this that we don’t place the burden of responsibility on the consumer which can lead to them feeling guilty for what they can and can’t do.
“The big responsibility is the companies. They are the ones who can make the really big changes that can then enable us to live in a better way.”
To read more about Tearfund’s Great Fashion Fast see here
