Challenges and Opportunities of Sustainable Fashion in India

Context: 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wore a blue vest made of recycled plastic bottles in Parliament last week. This emphasizes bringing sustainable clothing to the mass domain by addressing challenges related to it.

What is Sustainable Fashion?

• It refers to clothing that is designed, manufactured, distributed and used in ways that are environmentally friendly.

Need for Sustainable Fashion:

• Climate change: Textile and garment manufacturers to realign their operations to improve their ecological footprint and embrace alternative fibres that are recyclable and environment-friendly.
• Polluting sector: One-fifth of industrial water pollution and 10 percent of total carbon emissions is contributed by the textile industry. It emits greenhouse gases too.
• Environmental hazard: Cotton and polyester are not environmentally friendly as they require large amounts of water and energy to produce.
• Inefficient production process: The fast fashion model being relied upon by many fashion companies prioritizes speed and cost over sustainability, leads to overproduction and waste, as well as poor labour practices.
• Wreckful disposal method: The fashion industry produces a huge amount of waste like non-biodegradable leftovers and traditional disposal methods, such as landfilling or incineration, are not environmentally friendly. 
• Global shift toward sustainability: European Union (EU) has taken the lead to achieve sustainability in the textile sector by 2030.

Challenges to Sustainable Clothing:

• Elite domain & slow mass-market penetration: The primary challenge is that sustainable clothing in India is confined to the category of designer labels, hand-crafted ingenuity and high fashion.
• Raw material costs: The sustainable materials like organic cotton, handlooms and recycled polyester fibres can be more expensive than traditional materials.
  • The sustainable production methods, such as using non-toxic dyes and reducing water usage, can also increase costs.
• Consumer unawareness: It leads to the negative effects of fast-produced retail wear on the environment and the benefits of sustainable clothing.
• Lack of technological solutions: The garment manufacturers struggle to meet the demand for more garments due to lack of sophisticated technological solutions related to recycling, waste management and geometric cutting machines to reduce fabric waste.
• Barriers to clothing recycling: It includes inefficient waste collection, an incompetent system of sorting clothes, a lack of recycling innovation and a funding gap in recycling products.

Way Forward:

• The Indian government should prioritise offering green premiums to eco-friendly firms, assisting them in competing with “conventional fast-fashion rivals,”.
• The fashion companies must also work to educate consumers and collaborate with policymakers, marketers and retailers to promote sustainable fashion by rationalizing cost structure, legitimate endorsement by Bollywood stars, sports ambassadors, etc.
• The commercial scaling of recycling technologies needs to be promoted by eco-fashion brands to increase production of eco-friendly clothes.
• The companies must also shift to a slower, more deliberate production process that prioritises quality over quantity to reduce waste and promote recycling and repurposing of clothing.

News Source: The Indian Express