May Editorial

If you are, as I believe, fashion enthusiasts, and if you are, as I hope, conscious and engaged individuals, watch the series Junk – Full Closets (Junk – Armadi pieni). You will likely find something that mirrors your own behavior and certainly touches your conscience.

We all buy too much: it is called oniomania, a syndrome born of these times that drives frantic and impulsive purchasing, creating a true emergency for the global ecosystem. Obviously, the problem doesn’t start here; it is upstream in the industry, but individual choices can also make a difference. And Junk explains this very well.

Let’s start with this fact: despite people buying too much and poorly, the fashion industry today produces even more. Consider that only one-third of the clothing that reaches stores is actually purchased, and the remaining unsold garments and accessories continue each year to feed massive clothing landfills.

But before reaching the landfills, this merchandise often undertakes immense journeys around the globe, as clarified by a very interesting investigation by Internazionale regarding Zalando returns (up to 480 orders per minute, half of which are sent back). By tracking ten items bought online and returned using micro-GPS, they verified that within two months, these clothes traveled nearly 30,000 km between Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and then Sweden again before arriving at a storage center where they were supposedly to be destroyed—though no one confirms this. And we are talking about one of the industry giants that claims to want to be sustainable. The online fashion sector, partly due to returns, emits more carbon dioxide than all the world’s planes and ships combined.

But back to the landfills.

The docuseries Junk, produced by Will Media and Sky Italia and directed by Olmo Parenti (a talented young filmmaker already known for investigative films like “One day one day”), shows images we have never seen of literal mountains of clothes as large as cities, and tells the story of people and ecosystems directly suffering from the negative impact of fast fashion: from Ghana to Chile, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, and Italy.

Consider that in Europe alone, 5.8 million tons of clothes are discarded every year (11kg of clothing waste per person!). In Ghana, 15 million pieces of clothing arrive every week. They end up on city beaches and, as Matteo Ward (host and co-author of the series) told Io Donna, our waste becomes the new colonizers of poor countries. If you add to this the destruction of 300 million trees in Indonesia to make room for rayon plantations (which, remember, is a natural fiber because it is derived from bark, but is obtained through a chemical process and intensive farming) at the expense of native jungle communities and their ecosystem, it is easy to see that the excessive production of fast fashion is a colossal problem and that there is still not enough information about the damage it is causing to the environment. What we do know is that 10% of carbon emissions and 20% of ocean pollution come from the fashion sector and—another staggering figure—out of 75 million workers, less than 2% earn a living wage. If a few decades ago we almost always knew who cut and sewed our clothes, today it is impossible for the consumer to trace the production chain, which consists of a far from virtuous circle of infinite subcontracts, especially in the poorest countries.

It must be said that attention to this problem by large groups is increasing. Today, you cannot communicate in fashion without claiming to be eco-friendly, but according to experts in the field, in reality, no brand manages to be totally sustainable. There are various ways to be, but certainly, for younger brands, the process to follow is much more expensive. We at Crida know this well; from the very beginning, we decided to create our garments only with natural fabrics and without polyester fibers, even though these fabrics cost much more. Even more so when it comes to Italian silks and cottons: the ones we purchase do not come from Asia, thus avoiding the long-distance transport of goods and reducing pollution. Thanks to the activism of important organizations like Fashion Revolution Italia and the requests of many NGOs, the European Union has finally intervened to regulate textile legislation with a law that within two years will make eco-design mandatory, forcing companies to use only recyclable materials and to be responsible for the excess products they create, directing this incredible mass of garments toward recycling and disposal. But each of us is called to do our part.

Buying less and buying better is a mantra that Daniela and I have repeated since the birth of Crida. Now we add: produce less and produce better. Only if there is a radical change in the business ethics of large companies and in more conscious purchasing by people can we remedy the ecological and environmental disasters that some areas of the world are suffering. No one can pretend not to know, and everyone can act better. What I liked about Junk is that it is a project born to generate awareness about a perhaps still little-known global emergency, but also aimed at helping us understand that change is still possible and that in this match to save the planet, we all have a role to play.