Greenwashing - The Dark Side of the Fashion Industry

Being a consumer in the 21st century inevitably opens doors for advertising to flood your feed, but what happens when that content is misleading? In many cases this involves ‘greenwashing’, which is even more of a con than Circuit Laundry. Greenwashing is the act of painting a “green”, eco-friendly image of a company or product, when in reality, the people involved have no intention of prioritising sustainability at all.

It has been a crazy year for greenwashing: Kourtney Kardashian was appointed Boohoo’s sustainability ambassador, H&M released their new ‘conscious line’ composed primarily of new materials, and Shein launched a campaign to “empower women in the workplace” whilst simultaneously paying their garment makers 3p per item. We’ve seen it all! While the CEOs are faced with the tiring task of choosing which superyacht to bob about on this week, factory workers complete 18-hour shifts and wonder if today is the day that the building owners will regret not listening to structural complaints.

This is by no means hyperbole. On 24 April 2013, an eight story building called the Rana Plaza collapsed due to structural failure. The day before, employees had warned the owners about the cracks, but their concerns were ignored. 1,134 people died and 2,500 were injured. There were many more factory fires during the year following this disaster, yet shockingly, fast fashion profits continued to rise.

Wage Theft

I’d like to say that in the decade since the Rana Plaza collapse things have changed. They haven’t, conditions have stayed the same and the only improvement has been in the brand’s ability to conceal this from the public.. The beginning of the pandemic saw huge amounts of wage theft, with millions of dollars worth of labour still left unpaid from the start of lockdown. Adidas also refused to pay their Cambodian workers, who were laid off in 2020, the 2.47 million dollars they were owed in legal severance pay. In May, over 5600 garment makers went on strike at one of their Cambodian factories, and they responded by having three union leaders arrested, which goes against Adidas’ own supposed code of ethics. The business claims its ambition is to “become a more sustainable company”, but yet produced 340 million pairs of shoes in 2021 alone. They also recently launched their “next-generation” Stan Smith sneakers, promoting them as “100% iconic and 50% recycled”, with an “end plastic waste” logo when in reality that percentage only related to the only one part of the shoe.

In October last year, Channel 4 released a deep dive documentary “Inside the Shein Machine: Untold”, and they were revealed to be paying their garment workers 3p per garment for 18 hour days, with many making over 500 garments a day in order to make a living wage. Undercover recordings in Chinese sweatshops were made public in the documentary, which included discoveries such as workers being fined two thirds of their daily wage for minute mistakes. Meanwhile, the company, valued at 100 billion dollars in early 2022, launched their aforementioned campaign to “empower women in the workplace” by donating to a London based charity. Their anti-feminist “affordable” clothing is costing the earth, the people who made them, and us, the consumers, by convincing us that it is what we deserve. Slay I guess.

This is all Happening in the UK too…

In 2018 it was uncovered that there are many instances of modern slavery in Leicester’s clothing factories with Boohoo paying their garment makers £3.50 per hour, which constituted less than half the minimum wage at the time. (reality check: the CEO has a networth of £720 million). This news went viral and shocked thousands across the UK, even Priti Patel pretended to be appalled! Since then, these Leicester textile firms have been accused of money laundering and continuing the harsh conditions in factories for workers, including a refusal for toilet breaks. (Oddly, this came out in a study funded by Boohoo…) In the UK, there are also garment factories in Rochdale and Barnsley for JD Sports, Amazon and ASOS which were big hotspots for covid cases at the beginning of the pandemic due to workers’ inability to take sick days. As a result, Boohoo’s share prices dropped by a third and shortly after, they made a public statement claiming to be “shocked and appalled” by conditions they claimed to know nothing about. They have shrugged off similar slave labour revelations about suppliers many times, so this is nothing new for the company. As usual the media coverage moved on quickly after the feigned initial shock, and their sales surged in time once again. Luckily, Kourtney Kardashian swooped in to save the day, and was hired as Boohoo’s sustainability ambassador!

Legal Action

In all seriousness, the world is catching on. Glamour magazine pledged to “step up [their] commitment to serious sustainability” and will “avoid publicising collections that could be seen to involve greenwashing.” Additionally, mere months ago, H&M was sued (again) for its “misleading, illegal and deceptive” attempt to profit off the push for sustainable clothes. The lawsuit asserted that H&M was “taking advantage of consumers’ interest in sustainability” and products that “do not harm the environment”. This led to further investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority into ASOS, boohoo and George by ASDA to scrutinise their ‘green’ claims. In late 2020, H&M was also fined €35.26 million due to illegally collecting and storing personal information about their German employees, giving Oxshag a run for their money.

Gender based violence is also a huge problem within garment factories, where ironically, workers often make clothing with feminist slogans stitched on. Women have described the environment as one in which “total power” is wielded by the male supervisors.
Realistically, we all know that Amazon deserves their own article. In 2018 alone the company claimed to have emitted 44.4 million metric tonnes of C02, but dramatically undercounted by only including its own brand products, which account for just 1% of their online sales. Subsequently in the following year, they sponsored an event run by the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” which supported climate change denial.

Gen Z

Even some of Gen Z’s favourites, such as TikTok, are more subtle culprits of greenwashing, despite being a wonderful place to get important messages out there and a platform for many climate activists. However, as the climate crisis accelerates, the energy consumption and carbon emissions of emerging tech companies is rising. Tiktok has been driving action for COP27 and claims that they desire to instil in the new generation the aspiration of leaving a positive impact on the planet. However, Greenpeace evaluated their renewable energy performance in July 2022 and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is yet to make a single carbon reduction pledge. Currently they are piggybacking off the hard work of climate activists in order to appear to be a company that cares. Another classic of our generation, the indie girl’s favourite clothing shop, Urban Outfitters, donated to Trump’s re-election campaign, despite never paying for the work their garment makers did at the start of the pandemic.

Race

We cannot ignore the fact that fast fashion is very much a race issue. In 2020, we saw many brands capitalise off “Black Out Tuesday” while continuing to mistreat and abuse marginalised workers behind the scenes. The fashion industry is built on the oppression of black and brown bodies based on an institutional form of racism inherited from a colonial past. 80% of the people who make our clothes are female, the majority being people of colour. We can’t have a sustainable fashion revolution until these people feel safe, supported and celebrated, and the industry is actively anti-racist. Black, Indigenous and other people of colour in the Global South have historically contributed the least to global heating but are at a disproportionate risk from its impacts. Despite only making up 5% of the global population, indigenous communities have been found to be protecting 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity.

Graphic on ‘The Six Sins of Greenwashing.’ Image Credit: Blanc

Let’s be clear here. I didn’t write this piece to shame anyone reading this (unless Elon Musk has randomly landed upon this article, hi! I hope your shower is cold today.) Individuals are definitely not solely to blame here. It’s the corporations whose hands are bloody, despite their best efforts at (green)washing them. Carbon emissions of the world’s richest 1% are more than double those of the poorest half of the world. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of greenhouse gas emissions, with China Coal topping the list with emissions amounting to a horrific 14.3%. Without ethics, fair wages and anti-racism, we cannot have sustainable fashion.