Life Cycle Analysis of the Fashion Industry

Industrial Ecology Practices in the Fashion Industry

Introduction
The industrial revolution in the 1800s brought a paradigm shift to the way humans interacted with the environment. The increased capability of producing and manufacturing on a large scale, the rise of multiple industries, growing demand and proliferation of hedonistic consumption patterns, has created a culture of surplus, want and waste. (Falasca-Zamponi, 2012) From an environmental point of view, this resource hungry trend is unsustainable and has detrimental ecological impacts, such as pollution and climate change. These problems have highlighted the consequence of our insatiable demand for resources and the need to rethink current practices and thoughts in order to maintain current living standards and ensure future growth. The ideas of environmental management, industrial ecology and ecological footprint have been proposed to allow for a meticulous look to the products that we manufacture and use, with emphasis on measuring the ecological impacts in hopes of reducing them. A multitude of tools have since been created to measure efficiency in hopes to highlight areas for improvement, of which the ISO standard and Life cycle assessment are part of. Undoubtedly, many companies have adopted life cycle analysis (LCA) in order to assess and reduce their product’s impact on the environment.
The fashion industry, at its core, is based on the notion of continual consumption of the ‘new’ and the discard of the ‘old’, especially with new seasonal lines coming out every 3 months. The industry celebrates creativity with the continuous turnover of trends, leading to the “premature product replacement and fashion obsolescence”. This constant change has major negative environmental and social impacts, particularly on those at the bottom of the supply chain. (Allwood et al, 2006; Hethorn and Ulasewicz, 2008) Moreover, delocalised production, often all over the world, is commonly practiced in line with the

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