I speak with Maxine Bédat, a former fashion startup CEO and founder of the nonprofit New Standards Institute. We talk about the source of the fashion industry's GHG emissions, what can be done to reduce them, the need for regulation, and the right way to think about fast fashion.
Thanks for covering this! Yet another problem that has all kinds of solutions — and that could be mitigated even more by a different approach to consumption. Like back when people had fewer clothes but they were of better quality. But I realize it's a tall order to get back to that. What I do is annual clothes swaps, which I've started having in my backyard on account of covid. I have some friends who no longer shop for clothes and just wait for my swaps: https://flowerchild.substack.com/p/fighting-fast-fashion
So, we talked fashion's environmental impact at the Forests and Friends meet-up tonight and Patagonia came up. Would love to hear more about possible approaches and impacts when the corporation (presumably) wants to do good and not just greenwash, which to be fair may be more about business than fashion. And in that domain may tend more towards the Deming philosophy (people want to do good and meaningful work) than the Drucker/Taylor school (manage machines or people for results). Philosophy of business might be in your wheelhouse, though.
Repairability was how we got to Patagonia, and their advertising messaging of "don't buy this jacket," was the counter to the pressure for trendy choice where I got to use "you clearly don't spend much time on tick-tock" in casual conversation - so thank you both for that.
A lot of the talk kept coming back to drop-shipping and the carbon impact of air travel and that was kinda unclear. Is that air shipping is 40% more carbon impact than shipping, or air shipping becomes 40% of the carbon intensity of the manufacturing lifecycle? If the former, the textile mill and performance is still where to focus efforts, if the latter the air shipping is nearly as much as the textile mill by itself. This is an obvious place for regulation to have an impact, but past logistical shenanigans make it clear that unintended consequences are lurking here. Subsidy and regulation interact on a global scale and you can end up shipping an item around the world to take it across the street when fuel is cheaper over there in that country and maintenance work over in that other one - there are a lot of creative ways to farm subsidy and play regulation if you are focused just on cost in dollar terms. This leads back to the Deming vs. Drucker/Taylor thing again, really. Google is telling me air freight is 47x sea freight per ton-mile, which I kind of knew, but then we're talking 1% of the carbon story here or 1.5% of the carbon story so it felt like it got a lot more air-time than it really deserves because we 'know' in our hearts that airplanes == bad. That might not always be the case, they might even start landing with the same number of doors they took off with.
There is one other avenue for any manufacturing process to get more sustainable, and that is the siren call of pure efficiency. It turns out when you produce more goods for the same or less input cost your margins improve, so there is a natural incentive to shift from expensive and wasteful fuels to efficient ones... when your production line is sufficiently well established to consider equipment depreciation and COGS. An air-shipping fast-fashion vendor selling at a premium isn't in that regime and will be immune to the sustaining power of efficiency - it is the worst of all worlds.
So, from the 3 spider man meme, the company would implement a more sustainable solution if they hadn't hacked buyers to demand disposable goods and they only hacked buyers to demand disposable goods because there is a regulatory incentive to exploit de minimis and they are only exploiting de minimis because they are judged as successful or not based on the next quarter's results and they are only judged by the next quarter's results because that's capitalism, baby. Except it isn't, this is just all the commonly accepted contemporary form of capitalism and while that means we can change it, that also means it is super hard to change on purpose because someone has to be able to break the system and recreate it using a mechanism that doesn't exist within the system.
Thanks for covering this! Yet another problem that has all kinds of solutions — and that could be mitigated even more by a different approach to consumption. Like back when people had fewer clothes but they were of better quality. But I realize it's a tall order to get back to that. What I do is annual clothes swaps, which I've started having in my backyard on account of covid. I have some friends who no longer shop for clothes and just wait for my swaps: https://flowerchild.substack.com/p/fighting-fast-fashion
So, we talked fashion's environmental impact at the Forests and Friends meet-up tonight and Patagonia came up. Would love to hear more about possible approaches and impacts when the corporation (presumably) wants to do good and not just greenwash, which to be fair may be more about business than fashion. And in that domain may tend more towards the Deming philosophy (people want to do good and meaningful work) than the Drucker/Taylor school (manage machines or people for results). Philosophy of business might be in your wheelhouse, though.
Repairability was how we got to Patagonia, and their advertising messaging of "don't buy this jacket," was the counter to the pressure for trendy choice where I got to use "you clearly don't spend much time on tick-tock" in casual conversation - so thank you both for that.
A lot of the talk kept coming back to drop-shipping and the carbon impact of air travel and that was kinda unclear. Is that air shipping is 40% more carbon impact than shipping, or air shipping becomes 40% of the carbon intensity of the manufacturing lifecycle? If the former, the textile mill and performance is still where to focus efforts, if the latter the air shipping is nearly as much as the textile mill by itself. This is an obvious place for regulation to have an impact, but past logistical shenanigans make it clear that unintended consequences are lurking here. Subsidy and regulation interact on a global scale and you can end up shipping an item around the world to take it across the street when fuel is cheaper over there in that country and maintenance work over in that other one - there are a lot of creative ways to farm subsidy and play regulation if you are focused just on cost in dollar terms. This leads back to the Deming vs. Drucker/Taylor thing again, really. Google is telling me air freight is 47x sea freight per ton-mile, which I kind of knew, but then we're talking 1% of the carbon story here or 1.5% of the carbon story so it felt like it got a lot more air-time than it really deserves because we 'know' in our hearts that airplanes == bad. That might not always be the case, they might even start landing with the same number of doors they took off with.
There is one other avenue for any manufacturing process to get more sustainable, and that is the siren call of pure efficiency. It turns out when you produce more goods for the same or less input cost your margins improve, so there is a natural incentive to shift from expensive and wasteful fuels to efficient ones... when your production line is sufficiently well established to consider equipment depreciation and COGS. An air-shipping fast-fashion vendor selling at a premium isn't in that regime and will be immune to the sustaining power of efficiency - it is the worst of all worlds.
So, from the 3 spider man meme, the company would implement a more sustainable solution if they hadn't hacked buyers to demand disposable goods and they only hacked buyers to demand disposable goods because there is a regulatory incentive to exploit de minimis and they are only exploiting de minimis because they are judged as successful or not based on the next quarter's results and they are only judged by the next quarter's results because that's capitalism, baby. Except it isn't, this is just all the commonly accepted contemporary form of capitalism and while that means we can change it, that also means it is super hard to change on purpose because someone has to be able to break the system and recreate it using a mechanism that doesn't exist within the system.