Circular Fashion is an Ecosystem

By Alice Irene Whittaker

In reality, the best and most effective way to lighten our environmental footprint remains to buy less. To wear clothing longer. To mend ripped garments. To make do and experiment with an outfit we already have, rather than buying something new.

Alice Irene Whittaker

This article is an excerpt from Alice Irene Whittaker’s new book Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth. It has been edited for brevity and reprinted with the permission of the author. In addition to her work as a writer, Alice Irene leads communications for the Nature Investment Hub, a Generate Canada Solution Space.  

Each of us interacts with textiles every day, from the clothing that we put on in the morning to the sheets that we wrap ourselves in at night. Our clothing forms an intimate relationship with the health of our soil, ecosystems, and bodies. Natural, locally-sourced textiles are as important environmentally and health-wise as organic, local food, even though we don’t always think of it that way. The clothing we wear can be compared with the food we ingest: both start by growing on the Earth, cultivated by farmers, processed by workers, transported some distance, and then our bodies interact with them daily.

Circular fashion is a regenerative fashion system that is meant to continue in a closed loop indefinitely. This emerging solution reduces the extraction of virgin materials, reduces textile waste and pollution, and regenerates nature. The Sustainable Fashion Forum, founded by Brittany Sierra, defines it like this: “Circular fashion is a holistic design approach rooted in Indigenous ancestry that aims to ‘design out waste’ by reducing the number of natural resources used to make our clothing and diverting products from landfills. In short, circular fashion…is making new materials out of old materials.”

When we make fashion circular, garments circulate for as long as possible, using a variety of practices like mending and reuse to extend their life, and recycling as a last resort. From the very design of circular clothing, the whole life of the garment is considered, and at the end of its useful life it can finally safely return to nature. Common circular fashion practices include eliminating waste from the design stage, upcycling, mending, swapping, thrifting, selecting fabrics that can be composted, or recycling waste into new materials. 

To be meaningful, though, sustainable and circular fashion start with reduction of consumption in the first place and a redefinition of value. We need to consume less clothing, and the most effective action we can take is to buy less and wear what we already own. But too often, companies sell us the idea that we can continue to consume fashion at a great rate, if only it is organic cotton or if it is made out of old water bottles (though those efforts can be helpful and have their place in a set of many solutions).

In reality, the best and most effective way to lighten our environmental footprint remains to buy less. To wear clothing longer. To mend ripped garments. To make do and experiment with an outfit we already have, rather than buying something new. Good questions to ask ourselves: Do I need this? How many times will I wear this? Where did this item of clothing come from, and when I am done with it, where will it go?

For those items we do need to buy, we can change our definition of value. Fast fashion defines itself by its low cost, though fast fashion brings with it extraordinary environmental and human costs that are not shouldered by the person purchasing a garment. It is time to shift the conversation from cost to value – and our values – while also making sure that costs are not prohibitively high and that they are not excluding traditionally marginalized communities. When possible, we need to shift from having a lot of disposable clothes to having a few, carefully selected, high-quality items we treasure for their inherent value: creativity, inclusivity, and sustainability. To do that, fashion needs to go circular from the design stage. Trying to fix the problem after it is already designed into our clothing and the fashion industry is insufficient, like aloe after a sunburn instead of proper coverage before exposure to the sun.

Clothing should be designed with its whole life cycle in mind. There needs to be a creative plan for how each and every garment is going to biodegrade, or be dismantled, recycled, or resold. The fabrics, the zippers, the stitches, the timelessness of the design: all of these need to be considered with a lens of environmental care and protection. What happens to this specific fabric once it has a hole in it? Will this style still be desirable in two years? Can this zipper be easily removed to be reused in another garment? Does a designer’s company build sustainability into its business model? Who makes this clothing, and how are they treated? Designers need to ask these questions from ideation. 

While design comes before we wear clothes, most of the focus is on what to do after we are done with our clothing. Clothing companies often promote the recycling of textiles as the solution, and the idea resonates with people. Not all recycling is created equal, though. What we think is recycling often actually ends up as waste. This might be because facilities equipped to process the amount of waste produced do not yet exist, or because materials lack characteristics of recyclability.

Textile recycling, however, has existed for centuries. We should return to true textile recycling as the gold standard in how fashion can become circular. For textile recycling, the best candidates are wool, 100% cotton, 100% polyester or sometimes a cotton/polyester blend. New innovations for recycling textiles exist – for example, cellulose recycling – but we need to remain wary of relying too heavily on these technological approaches to recycling, because they take time to scale, and refusing, reducing, reusing, and manual recycling clothing should come first.

Also, by purchasing high-quality items that retain resale value, clothing can be reused many times before recycling is on the table. Recycling in isolation of other circular practices risks justifying continued excess consumption, which does not solve the waste problem of the current fashion system. Recycling can provide a useful tool in a circular fashion system, but only as part of a larger whole that emphasizes reduction, redesign, and repair first, with recycling as the final tactic after exploring more meaningful options.

We find ourselves at a moment of needing to solve many problems at once. “Just” focusing on sustainable materials and practices falls short. As we reinvent an industry that became one of the top-polluting and wasteful in the world, we also must recognize that fashion contributed to poor working conditions and exclusivity to people based on race or size. We enjoy an opportunity to redesign fashion to be environmentally-friendly and inclusive ­and supportive of workers’ rights. We can look, for example, at the connections between poor air quality from factories located near marginalized communities, or people in Global South countries being displaced from their homes by literal mounds of textile waste. 

We can build relationships with the people designing and making our clothing. Not only is the anonymous fast fashion approach environmentally destructive and the driver of a huge, insurmountable waste problem, but it also hides the supply chain from us so that we don’t know where our clothing comes from, who made it, or what working conditions workers endured. By buying high quality clothing in less quantity from small companies, if financially possible, we can support creativity, sustainability and good jobs.

Traditionally marginalized communities need to be seen, heard, and included as fashion becomes more sustainable. People in BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) communities have been talking about more sustainable, inclusive fashion for years, and their voices need to be centered in the conversations around sustainable fashion. We need a democratization of sustainable fashion, so that it belongs to all people and not a privileged few that mimics the elitism and inequality of the fashion world we wish to leave behind. This will be one of the defining differences between the new, circular fashion world and the old one. 

Circular fashion is an ecosystem of justice, climate, soil, labour, gender, creativity, expression, and culture, made up of people each with their own offering and niche, intricate in its diversity and interconnections. 

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October is Circular Economy Month, and we’re #GrowingTheCircle by sharing stories of circular innovation. We encourage you to share your own stories of circularity to help inspire others. Together, we can grow the circle of problem-solvers advancing a circular economy. 

In reality, the best and most effective way to lighten our environmental footprint remains to buy less. To wear clothing longer. To mend ripped garments. To make do and experiment with an outfit we already have, rather than buying something new.

Alice Irene Whittaker

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