The Fashion Industry and Climate Change

The fashion industry produces more methane and carbon dioxide than the aviation and transportation industries combined and is the industry with the second largest contribution to climate change after agriculture.

On Friday August 9th I presented at the Project Green Boise Sustainability Summit for Teachers about the impact that fashion has on our global water resources and climate change. The aim of this two-day summit for Boise and West Ada School District Teachers is to provide lesson plans and lessons that teacher can use to bring sustainability education into their classrooms, and to provide teachers with the knowledge that they need to educate their students on climate change and the sustainability challenges that we will be facing in the future.

My presentation focused on Fashion’s Impact on Global Water Resources. Research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and from Fashion Industry magazines show that fashion is one of the most unspoken of and most impactful industries in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emissions, and water use as it takes 10,000 gallons of water to harvest the volume of raw cotton that is needed to develop one pair of jeans and another 750 gallons of water to produce the same pair of jeans (https://unfccc.int/news/un-helps-fashion-industry-shift-to-low-carbon). Eventhough fashion is not my background, I was inspired to learn more about fashion’s impact on claim change after attending a Project Drawdown workshop in Boise and hearing a documentary filmmaker talk about the work that he is doing documenting nine Boise high school students to learn about how they believe climate change will affect their lives.

These students were very concerned about fashion and its impact on global warming and after researching fashion’s impact on climate change. I started to see that educating students on the environmental impacts of the fashion industry may put enough pressure on the fashion industry to cut its carbon emissions and resource use, while also creating students who are global citizens that take action to inspire new solutions and actions towards reversing climate change.

The Fashion industry also contributes to climate change as conventionally produced cotton, of which 99% of the world’s cotton is conventional produced and is typically fertilized with nitrous oxide (https://www.commonobjective.co/article/can-fashion-stop-climate-change). Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Our goal at Pure Love Sustainability Inc. is to reverse and eliminate climate change and is determined to educate and inspire and lead movements where students, adults, communities, businesses and local governments take action to reduce their carbon footprint and their impact on the planet.

For more information about Pure Love Sustainability Inc. and the work that they do to reverse climate change, please either visit our website or email me directly.

Michael Forman

Founder

Pure Love Sustainability inc.

Boise, ID 83712

(208)584-1492

purelovesustainabilityinc@gmail.com

www.purelovesustainabilityinc.com

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