May Editorial

If you are, as I believe, fashion enthusiasts and, as I hope, conscious and engaged individuals, watch the series Junk – Armadi pieni. You’ll likely find something that reflects your own behaviors and definitely touches your conscience.

We all buy too much: oniomania — the syndrome of our times that drives unrestrained and impulsive buying, creating a true emergency for the global ecosystem. Obviously the root of the problem lies upstream in the industry, but individual choices can also make a difference. And Junk explains this very well.

Let’s start with this fact: even though we buy too much and often poorly, today the fashion industry produces even more. Consider that only one third of the clothing that arrives in stores is actually purchased, and the rest of unsold garments and accessories continues each year to feed massive clothing landfills.

But before reaching those landfills, this merchandise often travels vast distances around the globe, as highlighted by a fascinating investigation by Internazionale into Zalando returns (up to 480 orders per minute, half of which are returned). By tracking ten items bought online and returned via micro-GPS, it was found that within two months these clothes traveled nearly 30,000 km between Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and back to Sweden before arriving at a storage center where they are supposedly destroyed—though no one confirms it. And we’re talking about one of the giants of the apparel industry that claims to be sustainable. The online fashion sector—even because of returns—emits more carbon dioxide than all the planes and ships in the world combined.

But let’s return to the landfills.

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

Consider that in Europe alone 5.8 million tonnes of clothing are discarded each year (11 kg of clothing waste per person!). In Ghana, 15 million garments arrive each week. They end up on city beaches and, as Matteo Ward (host and co-author of the series) tells “Io Donna”, our waste becomes the new colonizers of poor countries. If you add the clearing of 300 million trees in Indonesia to make way for rayon plantations (which, let’s recall, is a natural fiber derived from bark but produced through a chemical and intensive cultivation process), at the expense of native jungle communities and their ecosystem, it’s easy to see that the overproduction of fast fashion is a colossal problem that we are still insufficiently informed about in terms of the damage it causes to the environment. What we do know is that 10% of carbon emissions and 20% of ocean pollution derive from the fashion industry, and another shocking fact is that of 75 million workers fewer than 2% earn a living wage. Whereas a few decades ago we almost always knew who cut and sewed our clothes, today it’s impossible for consumers to trace the production chain—a highly unvirtuous circle of endless subcontracting, especially in the poorest countries.

Attention to this issue by the major groups, it must be said, is continually increasing. Today you can’t communicate in fashion without claiming to be eco-friendly, but according to experts in the field, no brand actually manages to be fully sustainable. There are various ways to be sustainable, but for younger brands the process is certainly much more expensive. We at Crida know this well, as from the beginning we decided to create our garments only with natural fabrics and without polyester fibers, even though these fabrics cost much more. All the more so when it comes to Italian silks and cottons: those that we source ourselves and that do not come from Asia, thus avoiding shipping goods long distances and reducing pollution. Thanks to the activism of important organizations such as Fashion Revolution Italia and the demands of many NGOs, the European Union has finally intervened to regulate textile legislation with a law that will, within two years, 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 to recycling and disposal. But each of us is called to do our part.

Buy less and buy better is a mantra that Daniela and I have repeated since Crida’s inception. Now we add: produce less and produce better. Only if there is a radical change in business ethics among major companies and in people’s more conscious purchasing can we remedy the ecological and environmental disasters that some areas of the world are experiencing. 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 of a global emergency that may still be little known, but also aimed at making us understand that change is still possible and that in this game to save the planet we all have a role to play.