What are textiles?

Textiles are woven cloths and fabrics uses as the basis for clothes, things like linen and towels and general materials like velvet or leather. They make up most the world around us, well at least the stuff that isn’t made of metal, so its safe to say that they are very important to for our wellbeing standards. Textiles became a key industry back in the 1800’s with the invention of the spinning jenny right before the Industrial Evolution and has since expanded globally, generating around 28.5 billion USD for Australia and 3 trillion globally. But, textiles have a much darker side to them.

How they are made

Textiles are often produced under cheap labour in developing countries like China and India that have sweatshops and factories running away tirelessly. This is how businesses take advantage of the lack of bounded rationality and perfect information that regular consumers have. These factories are often very small and congested and they even employ children to work for them. Well, employ isn’t really the right world as they don’t even get paid properly. More than 36% of China’s working population (462 million) live on less than 2$ a day. The working conditions of sweatshops are very poor, with little ventilation and humid temperatures coupled with poorly managed pollution makes it very dangerous for their workers to be there full time. This can be linked back to the Triple P Bottom Line as manufacturing and designer companies want to produce as many goods as possible for the cheapest price possible (maximising the P for Profit) and also the traditional viewpoint of economics. The factories themselves also follow the same rules, using forced labour or paying very little as a means to minimise cost and produce as many textiles as possible. This affects both People and Planet as the employees face dire working conditions essentially putting their life on the line for a single piece of clothing or textile and also the impact on the environment being carbon emissions, water usage and land usage. In my opinion, sweatshops should be abolished. They are purely driven by greed and the addiction to wanting to make profit, following present bias of large manufacturers. The profit earned is definitely not worth the risk they put their ’employees’ under and for about a couple million more these companies could invest in proper employment that is both sustainable to people and planet. For example, a company like Apple made 265.5 billion in 2018. It was found that in their Chinese sweatshops, some of the workers had committed suicide to escape the terrible working environment. Out of their total revenue, it would only cost them about 10% of it to just slightly improve working conditions. Why is this important? Because if they did invest in this, it would appear more appealing to customers and hence boost their sales, making up for the money expended. But whose responsibility is it to fix it? Us, the consumers, the businesses, or the government?

Impact on the environment

Textiles are very resource heavy to create. In fact, it is the third largest industry consumer of water. Cotton is the main plant involved in making fabrics, accounting for over 90% of all textiles produced worldwide. Some of the scary figures is that it takes 30000L of water to make 1kg of cotton, and it takes 2700L per cotton shirt produced. This is just to produce cotton. 40% of domestic water usage comes from just washing the clothes on a rinse cycle in a laundry machine. All in all, fabrics as of right now are not very water sustainable at all. Let’s take a closer look at China, one of the worlds’ largest textile producers. It holds more than 20% of the total population but only 7% of the worlds’ fresh water source. Of which, they have not taken proper care of over 87000 reservoirs, 43% of which are in extremely poor condition. Most of the cotton is cultivated near the Yangtze and Yellow River basins, where dyes are also created and further pollute these areas. China will need to increase its water availability by 5 times in order to remain somewhat sustainable by 2035. The water problem is solely due to relative scarcity, which is being amplified by the growing population. Culturally, it is causing many rural groups to fight over both water sources and also the authorities and developers looking to establish new cities to draw away the population congestion from the coastal megacities. Clearly, it is evident that everyone is disregarding the ethics of economics. It is much more than just an economic problem. I believe the next war will be entirely about water and food as the world grows to become increasingly more unsustainable. The question becomes, how can we fix this?

Neglection of textile recycling

I’m sure everyone has seen ads about how littering destroys not only the plants around us, but also as far reaching as marine life in the seas. This is also being backed by the government in an attempt to nudge us to change our perception of the environment. This will only fix half the problem. To be frank, I had only found out about the negatives of textiles through researching this blog – there just isn’t enough awareness about how serious it is. A YouGov (AU) survey found that 3/4 of us simply throw away our old and unwanted clothes or linen that cause 10% of global carbon emissions at landfills. Linking back to behavioural economics, the fashion industry is largely driven by consumer-controlled market where we make the decision on what does or doesn’t fit in with the current season. This is caused by the social phenomenon of fast fashion, where people are affected by herd mentality of fashion pioneers who constantly change trends on the runway and hence increase the need to create more fabrics for us to consume. Designer labels are the only brands that, ironically, actually value textiles. Their extraordinary prices are not put in place just to make a profit, but actually because the reflect the price needed to create the single piece of clothing as it travels from the cotton fields to our hands.

Potential solutions

Fortunately for us, the solutions are quite simple and within reach. The government can implement negative incentives on businesses who do not ethically source textiles and tax them for excessive water consumption. Brands like Nike have begun to collect waste textiles and recycle them to create their new cutting edge products. Textile recycling has many benefits: reduced water consumption, carbon emissions, landfill space, less water and air pollution and also better for the employees at sweatshops who can instead focus on recycling or restoring unwanted fabrics.