Corrigé synthèse type CENTRALE thème : Clothes

1. The clothing industry in need of a green washing

        As measures are taken to mitigate climate warming, humanity need to tackle the issue raised by the clothing industry. The four documents, three recent press articles – one from the New Scientist, one from The Economist and one found on the BBC website – and a graph tackle this issue, giving some clues on how to reduce the impact of the clothing industry on the environment.

        From production to disposal, the clothes we wear have a huge impact on the environment. According to the article from The New scientist, this industry generates 1.2 tons of greenhouse gasses a year, and in the UK, the graph states that 26% of emissions have the same cause. Moreover, those numbers are on the rise : as mentioned in the article from The Economist, the industry's impact have doubled in the last 15 years, due to either more polluting processes or a rise in demand. The clothes we wear everyday pollute the environment in more than a way: natural fibers like cotton use up to 2.5% of arable land, and loads of pesticides are used to increase productivity, but synthetic fibers such as polyester (which is getting more and more popular) are even more polluting as they are harder to recycle, and not biodegradable. Waterproof and “washed” clothes are made using chemicals especially polluting. When “used” pieces of clothing are often not recycled and end up in landfills or even burnt.

        In order to reduce the impact on the environment, the three articles mention some solutions already existing or in development. First of all, the article from the BBC website focuses on how are recycled a major part of the clothes thrown away. Such clothes come in India to be either sold as second hand clothes or to be fully recycled. In that case, the clothes are shredded and made into blankets, then sold in Africa or used in natural disasters. This process is suffering from the rise of polyester clothes which are getting cheaper. This issue could be tackled by another way of reducing the impact on the environment: changing the way we make clothes, to make it less polluting and to make clothes stronger so as to make them last longer. A few of the new techniques are mentioned in the article from New Scientist: fibers can be grown from all sorts of natural organisms or material such as yeast, bacteria, milk proteins or citrus fruit waste. But the issue is that the existing industry is well developed so in the short run, production of fibers is going to have to be cleaner and the “better cotton” initiative could help, as well as innovations in the processing of fibers as those initiative claim to have a smaller impact on the environment.

        Changing the clothing industry is a necessary step to help mitigate global warming. Whether by making the current processes cleaner or by finding new ones, innovation in that industry has to happen.

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